[lfjokes] ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

[Adam Shand]

in case you haven't seen this somewhere (and you must have lived in a cave
not to), just type the catch phrase into google.  yeah and you thought you
were hip.

ps. ya'll can stop fucking mailing this to me now!  okay?  and i haven't
cited anyone cause i've had it mailed to me way to many times, i was just
waiting for a good history of it all. :)

URL:  http://www.stileproject.com/base.html  (flash video)
URL:  http://hubert.retrogames.com/history.htm (history)

[ note: all the links are missing, so if you're really curious  go to the
  above web page. ]

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: A Retrospective

Since this thing seems to be getting WAY out of hand, I thought I'd
provide this history. I've been involved with the phenomenon since the
early days, and am passing on that knowledge so future generations may
learn from us. If anybody who was involved cares to add to this history,
please e-mail me.

As you probably know, the phrase came from a badly translated video game
intro. The game was Zero Wing, released on the Sega Genesis/Megadrive. The
English version seems to have been a Europe-only release. As to WHY it's
so popular... That's a bit of a mystery. My personal opinion is that it's
a perfect summary for the badly translated games of our youth. Not only
that, but "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" and "FOR GREAT JUSTICE" are
just plain random fun. Suffice to say, it's a gamer thing.

Here's the sequence of events:

* Early 2000: The Zero Wing animated .GIF is posted on Zany Video Game
  Quotes. It begins slowly circulating the internet.

* June 5, 2000: The Zero Wing Dub Project is posted at OverClocked.

* Mid - Late 2000: The forums at SomethingAwful start to get infected. The
  .gif is in at last one person's signature. It gets posted with some
  regularity in various threads. A few people link back to the dub.

* October 2000: A gimmick poster called Alf posts a picture of Alf on the
  phone. Somebody (identity lost to time and forum crashes) adds a speech
  bubble saying "All your base are belong to us." It's a hit, and gets
  posted a few more times.

* Approx. November 4, 2000: A thread is posted - The title is "ALL YUOR
  BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!" (yes, it was spelled "YUOR"), and the only
  message is "ON THE TABLE!!" By the end of the first page, the
  photoshopping had begun. The original image is still unknown - the
  author of the image previously believed to be the first has corrected
  me, does anybody out there remember?

  - Around page 10, word begins to spread. HardOCP is one of the first to
    link back to it. Some of the pictures are incredible works of
    Photoshopping (like the Times Square pic done by The Yellow Yell).

  - The forums collapse in on themselves. Suddenly, the last couple of
    pages of the thread disappear. A short time after, somebody using a
    hacked moderator account deletes the thread. History is lost. The
    archive of the early parts of the thread remains.

  - People who had been exposed to the phenomeon (mostly 3D game fans)
    take it back to their own boards, and similar threads (often using the
    same pictures) are started.

* November (?) 14, 2000: JRR, one of the SA forum regulars, releases
  Invasion of the Gabber Robots, the Zero Wing remix. NOTE: I'm not 100%
  sure of the month - the thread is still archived, but the forum doesn't
  show months. It was most likely either November or December.

* December 16, 2000: Tribal War's thread begins. As this is one of the
  oldest remaining threads, they are often mistakenly given credit for
  starting the phenomeon.

* January 12, 2001: Part 4 of "A Winner Is You," Hubert's game quote-based
  storyline is posted. It passes completely beneath the pop culture radar.

* Approx. February 15, 2001: Bad_CRC of Tribal War releases the music
  video. There are some copyright issues (permission wasn't asked to use
  JRR's song), but it continues to spread like wildfire.

* February 20, 2001: OverClocked returns with a Zero Wing based comic.

* February 21, 2001: GameFaqs posts a FAQ for Zero Wing, which includes a
  better translation taken from the Japanese version.