Games - All your base are belong to us

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"All your base are belong to us" (sometimes referred to as "All Your Base" and often abbreviated AYBABTU, AYBAB2U, or simply AYB) is a phrase that sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002. The text is taken from the opening found in the English version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing, the translation of which was terrible to the point of hilarity. The game was originally produced by Toaplan in 1989. Groups of game enthusiasts began digitally altering various images to include the phrase. Eventually, these images were collected together onto one site, Tribalwar, and a Flash animation produced from them, which was widely downloaded.

The well-known quotations were taken from the European localization of the Sega Mega Drive port released in 1992. The arcade version of Zero Wing does not include the quote, though it does include an equally butchered ending; the intro for the PC Engine version has CD-quality spoken dialogue but has a completely different introduction. Zero Wing was never released in North America and therefore never came to the Sega Genesis, the North American Mega Drive.

AYB is interesting because it demonstrated the Internet's power to quickly spread idiosyncratic messages that would never have been covered by the traditional mass media. Although the fad has died down, the phrase continues to be one of the most commonly quoted examples of "Engrish." The phrase is also often used as a battle cry on many competitive video games, particularly ones played over the Internet.

AYB is often cited as an example of a meme, a self-propagating piece of information, because of its broad, rapid spread across the Internet and around the world. It has also been recognized as a snowclone, wherein a familiar phrase is modified by substituting new words into the phrase (for example, "All your bug are belong to me" as used on Wikipedia's ).

Newgrounds' Flash portal spawned many variants of the Flash animation with a wide range of content, creativity, and quality.

History

The phrase is a line from the game's introductory cut scene, which is subtitled and poorly translated (see Engrish). It made its first appearance on the Internet in 1998. During mid- to late 1998, the phrase began appearing on many Internet forums. In 2000, Jared and Canadian Gabber group The Laziest Men on Mars created the song "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" using samples from the game theme by Tatsuya Uemura (including a robotic voice synthesis rendition of the complete cut-scene dialogue, which by some accounts caused mp3.com to temporarily remove the track from their servers for perceived copyright violation).

By the second half of February 2001 a huge number of altered pictures, GIF animations, and Macromedia Flash animations (in addition to photos of actual sightings) swept over the Internet, the first being the twelfth episode of Eskimo Bob, in what creators Tomas and Alan Guinan later declared their worst episode to date, going so far as to post warnings advising people not to watch it. It has been used as a caption for almost any photograph since the heavily overloaded word "base" (along with homonyms such as bass and compounds like base pair) seemed to make the phrase mean almost anything. Numerous persons and groups also replaced the word "base" with other topics (e.g. "all your data are belong to us," "all your vote are belong to us," "all your oil are belong to U.S."), generally suggesting someone's aggressive dominance — either real or imagined — in a particular field.

AYB in the media

Due to its immense popularity, the phrase or some variation of the lines from the game has been seen in innumerable articles, books, comics, clothing, movies, radio shows, songs, television shows, video games, webcomics, and websites. However, few have actually drawn any legitimate media attention. A selection of those that have garnered such coverage follows; a Google search will turn up thousands more hits on individual websites.

On 2001-02-23, Wired magazine provided an early report on the phenomenon in an article entitled "When Gamer Humor Attacks," which covered everything from the Flash animation to its spread through e-mail and Internet forums to T-shirts bearing the phrase.

In the FoxTrot comic strip on 2001-03-12, Jason Fox (the nerdy youngest child) began to shout, "All your base are belong to us!" confusing his parents. Bill Amend has been known to incorporate "geek culture" into his comic strips, such as the fictional MMORPG
"World of Warquest."

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for All your base are belong to us ]

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