About

"All Your Base Are Belong to Us" is a popular catchphrase that swept across the internet at the dawn of 21st century 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 1989 port of the side-scrolling arcade shooter Zero Wing, 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, causing the following exchange:

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.

The poor grammar present is an example of Engrish; phrases originally written in an Asian language but translated poorly into its closest English approximation.

Its first appearance on the internet is enigmatic due to site shutdowns making the origin difficult to track. It was popularized in 1998/1999 on the Rage Games forum, which is now known as Classic Gaming powered by IGN. It also was popular on Zany Video Game Quotes, archived here with a Zero Wing image on their main page, 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. Later, in February, 2001, Bad_CRC of Tribal War released a music video that would become famous across the internet, which was also uploaded to Newgrounds on February 16th, 2001.

Appearances in Popular Culture

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.

After the Bad_CRC music video was released, the meme was propelled into the mainstream, and shortly after Wired wrote an article on February 23, 2001. That year, mention of "All Your Base" appeared on various news sites, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and USA Today. "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.

For Great Justice!

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 websites rose to fame for reusing the quote. Aditionally, 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.

Search Trends

The rise of 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 has spread to Youtube videos as well.

External References