All Your Base Are Belong to Us

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About

"All Your Base Are Belong to Us" is a popular engrish catchphrase that grew popular across the internet as early as in 1998. An awkward translation of "all of your bases are now under our control", the quote originally appeared in the opening dialogue of Zero Wing, a 16-bit shoot'em up game released in 1989. Marked by poor grammar, the "All Your Base" phrase and the dialogue scene went viral on popular discussion forums in 2000, spawning thousands of image macros and flash animations featuring the slogan both on the web and in real life.

Origin

The phrase and game footage used in the meme come from the 1992 port of the 1989 side-scrolling arcade shooter Zero Wing,^[8] released on the SEGA Mega Drive. The quote is from the introduction sequence of the game in which the main antagonist, the leader of CATS appears to announce "all your base are belong to us" during an exchange with the ship's captain. The first GIF of the opening sequence is rumored to have originated on the Rage Games website in early 1998.^[16] Additionally, the website Zany Video Game Quotes^[11] has been credited with popularizing the GIF.^[12]^[13] According to a timeline published on the site RetroGames.com,^[15] the GIF was posted on the site Zany Video Game Quotes in "late 1998/early 1999."

Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha …
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice.

Spread

In June 2000, Overclock.org posted their Zero Wing Dub Project, featuring a dubbed version of the introduction with Wayne Newton's voice. The video is among the first response videos to the phrase. On December 16th, 2000, Tribal War Forums^[14] member Bad_CRC submitted a thread titled "All your base are belong to us," featuring a quote from the opening sequence. In February 2001, Bad_CRC released a music video for a gabber remix of the song, which was also uploaded to Newgrounds^[9] on February 16th, 2001 (shown below).

In late 2000, there was a large thread on the TribalWar forums. At this time, the trend also hit SomethingAwful. According to Frogstar.com, the first photoshop thread began in November 2000, obtaining over 2000 images. The thread has since been lost on account of hacking. This thread also led to the song Invasion of the Gabber Robots, by The Laziest Men On Mars.

On February 23rd, 2001 Wired wrote an article on the phrase. That year, mention of "All Your Base" appeared on various news sites, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and USA Today.

In February 2004, North Carolina State University students hacked into the local news live broadcasting system that reports on weather-related closures and replaced it with the phrase "All your base are belong to us".^[5]

On June 1st, 2006, Engineers at YouTube replaced the site with a message reading "ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US" as they prepared to roll out new site features.^[6]

"All Your Base" also appeared on a Chicago Fox news station, uploaded to YouTube in 2006, where Greg Lindsay from Inside.com compared repeating the phrase to people saying "WAZZZUP" in Budweiser commercials.

On June 12, 2014, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, released a blog posting stating that they "will not initiate patent lawsuits." The post was entitled: "All our Patent Are Belong to You".^[7]

In addition to the macros and videos, the meme also spawned a catchphrase of its own: For Great Justice. It is mainly used as a motto to encourage someone in carrying an action right to the end.
Oh Internet describes it as:

[…]everyday tasks are made more humorous by adding the suffix "…for great justice" to a directive, invitation, or announcement. It is generally assumed that a person using this phrase (or any other meme) has nothing of real value to express.

Several well-known video games such as World of Warcraft and Guild wars reference the line. The line also gained an article on the TV Tropes site.

2023 Zero Wing Rerelease

On February 14th, 2023, Bitwave Games rereleased the classic Zero Wing on Steam^[17] and other platforms, which initially drew criticism from some for not initially including the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" scene. However, the Bitwave port was actually based on the 1989 arcade version of Zero Wing and not the Sega Genesis port, which included the humorous translation that spawned the meme.^[18]

However, on February 16th, following widespread coverage about the meme missing from the new remaster, Bitwave Games confirmed in a tweet on its official Twitter^[18] account that the scene with CATs would be added in a patch soon, stating:

Shmupers! CATs is coming to Zero Wing but hasn’t set us up the bomb yet. The iconic scene from Zero Wing, reimagined, will be included in a free patch coming soon. Thank you all for your patience!

Then on March 2nd, 2023, Bitwave uploaded the reworked intro for Zero Wing that included the Sega Genesis version with the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" scene to its YouTube channel, showing off a slightly redesigned CATs and the classic catchphrase. The video accumulated over 2,000 views in less than 24 hours, as well as receiving notable praise in the comments section (seen below).

Various Examples

Search Trends

The rise of the All Your Base phenomenon also coincided with the advents in image-editing software like Photoshop, assisting in establishing Photoshopped images as a common medium for internet memes and mutations. Early derivatives took the form of image macros and Flash animations, and later the meme spread to YouTube videos as well.