The early web
All your base are belong to us
1999
“All your base are belong to us” is a badly translated line from Zero Wing, a 1989 Japanese space shooter by Toaplan, as it appeared in the game’s 1991 European release. Gamers passed the scene around as a GIF from about 1999, and a Flash video in February 2001 made it famous worldwide.
- Year
- 1999
- Made by
- A garbled line in the 1991 game Zero Wing, remixed by gamers
- Where it started
- Gaming sites, as an animated GIF of the game’s opening
- What it was
- A mistranslated video game line
- Also called
- All Your Base, AYBABTU
The story
In the game’s opening, the villain CATS tells a starship captain that his side has taken all of the captain’s bases. The English was written by a Toaplan employee who handled the company’s overseas business, not by a translator, and the same short scene gave the web more lines, like Somebody set up us the bomb and For great justice.
Gamers rediscovered the scene around 1999, and by late 2000 forum users were pasting the phrase into doctored photos. In November 2000 the DJ Jeffrey Ray Roberts made a techno track with a voice reading the lines, and on 16 February 2001 a forum member posted a Flash music video on Newgrounds that set the track to the pictures.
Within a week it was among the top searches on Lycos, and within two weeks it was in newspapers, in Time magazine and on CNN.
Why it matters
It was one of the first memes to leap from gaming forums into mainstream news around the world, and it shows remix culture building in layers: a GIF, doctored pictures, a techno track and a Flash video, each made by different people.
Where it is now
It is still quoted more than twenty years on. YouTube’s maintenance page once read All your video are belong to us, and when Zero Wing came to Steam in 2023 without the famous scene, fans made sure it came back.
Sources
- All your base are belong to us (Wikipedia)
- Zero Wing (Wikipedia)
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us (Know Your Meme)
- All your base: a critique (MIT Comparative Media Studies)
- American Dialect Society mailing list, March 2001
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.