Fun Fact: "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" Came from a Bad Translation
Abstract
One of the first internet memes was a garbled line of English from a 1991 Sega game. “All your base are belong to us” was Sega of Europe’s clumsy translation of the intro to the shoot-em-up Zero Wing. Rediscovered around 1999 and turned into a Flash animation in 2001, it spread by email and forums into a worldwide joke, and even onto real street signs.
The Line
Zero Wing was a Toaplan arcade shooter from 1989. When it was ported to the Sega Mega Drive in 1991, the console version added an opening cutscene, which Sega of Europe translated from Japanese without a professional translator. The result was broken English throughout: “Somebody set up us the bomb”, “You have no chance to survive make your time”, and the villain CATS declaring “All your base are belong to us”. The original Japanese simply meant that CATS had captured all of the player’s bases.
The line lay dormant until forum users rediscovered the screenshots around 1999. In 2000 and 2001 it became a Flash animation set to a remix, splicing the game text with Photoshopped images of the slogan pasted onto billboards, storefronts, and cereal boxes. It spread through email and message boards into a genuine phenomenon; Wired covered it on February 23, 2001. The joke jumped off the screen in 2004 when several people planted “All your base are belong to us” signs around Sturgis, Michigan, and were briefly detained by police who did not get the reference.
It is an early demonstration that an internet meme needs no meaning to spread. A shared reference, the stranger the better, is enough. See Internet Memes.