All Your Base Are Belong To Us

~ the obit ~

In february 2001 i was dialing in from home, and a flash file with a soundtrack in it was a decision rather than a click. You started the download and then you waited, and if the thing turned out to be nothing you had spent the evening's connection on nothing. All your base came to me the way most of that year came to me, late and in text form, a sentence people typed at each other in forums months before i ever loaded the video it came from.

The sentence is ten years older than the joke. Zero Wing was a Toaplan shooter, in arcades from july 1989, and the european mega drive conversion that arrived in july 1991 opened with a scene the japanese version did not have. The english in it was written by somebody on the design team rather than by a translator. What survives is a villain called CATS announcing that all your base are belong to us, and the captain being told he has no chance to survive make his time.

It circulated as a quotation for years before it had pictures attached. Zany Video Game Quotes ran it, TribalWar ran it, and it was the kind of line that gets typed into a thread when there is nothing else to say. In november 2000 a programmer in Kansas City named Jeffrey Ray Roberts cut a techno track out of the audio. On 16 february 2001 a Newgrounds user posting as Bad_CRC put that track under a video of the line pasted onto road signs and product labels, and that was the version that got out.

Six weeks later it was in Time and Wired, which is how you knew it was finished. The half-life of these things was shorter than anyone admits now. A joke that requires you to have played a badly translated 1991 shooter does not survive contact with a newspaper explaining it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ where the sentence came from ~

Toaplan was a real studio with a real catalog, and Zero Wing was a competent horizontal shooter that nobody would otherwise be discussing in 2026. The english was not incompetence so much as budget. Japanese publishers of that era handed the english text to whoever in the building claimed to have some, and the results filled arcades for a decade. Zero Wing is only the famous one because its bad line happened to be quotable.

The studio did not live to see any of it. Toaplan went under in 1994 and its staff scattered into Cave and Raizing, where they spent the rest of the nineties making the shooters that people who care about shooters actually name. The company's most durable export turned out to be a line of broken english it did not proofread.

~ how it spread ~

Nothing about the distribution looks familiar now. There was no share button and no counter on the page. The video lived at a URL, and the URL traveled inside forum posts and email, which meant the joke moved at the speed of people deciding to tell each other about it. Newgrounds was the closest thing to a venue, and being on its front page in early 2001 was as close to going viral as the language allowed before there was a word for it.

The other thing that made it work is that the joke was portable. You did not need the video at all. You needed one sentence dropped into the middle of an unrelated one, and the person reading it either knew or did not. That is the whole mechanism of an in-joke, and 2001 was the last moment the english-speaking internet was small enough for a single one to cover most of it.

~ the day it died ~

On 1 april 2003 seven people aged between seventeen and twenty put signs up around Sturgis, Michigan, reading all your base are belong to us, you have no chance to survive make your time. It was meant as an april fool. The town was three weeks into a war and did not read it that way. Police chief Eugene Alli told reporters the signs could be a borderline terrorist threat depending on how someone interpreted them, and that terrorist acts would not be tolerated. The seven were picked up and the local station ran the story on 4 april.

That is the moment a joke stops being one. As long as everybody who saw the sentence recognized it, it worked as a password. The second it reached an audience reading it literally, it was a threatening sign on a road in michigan, and the only people still laughing were the ones explaining themselves to the police. Nothing survives being explained that thoroughly.

The video outlived the joke by a long way and then died on its own schedule. It was a flash file, and when Adobe switched Flash off at the end of 2020 the original stopped running in any browser without an emulator in front of it. The sentence is still in circulation as a fossil, worn smooth, mostly used now by people who have never seen the game it was printed in.

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