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All your base are belong to us
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The infamous phrase is a piece of subtitled dialogue from the introduction to Zero Wing."All your base are belong to us." (sometimes referred to as "All Your Base" or abbreviated AYBABTU or simply AYB) is a phrase that sparked an Internet phenomenon that occurred in 2001 and 2002. The phenomenon initially took the form of the sentence appearing on the Something Awful Forums. Many images were digitally altered so that the phrase was added in, either obviously or discreetly. Eventually these were collected together onto one site and a Flash animation produced from them, which was widely downloaded. The original Quicktime movie can be found here. The most popular version of the video, done by The Laziest Men on Mars, can be found here.
The phrase arose from a poor translation used in the English version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing, originally produced by Toaplan in 1989. The infamous 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, nor any other dialogue; 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.
"All Your Base" was interesting in that it demonstrated the power of the Internet to quickly spread idiosyncratic messages that would never have been covered by the traditional mass media. Although the fad has since 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.
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More spoken articlesContents [hide]
1 Origins
2 Transcript
3 Original Japanese text
4 Alternative translation
5 Related phrases and usage
6 AYBABTU offline
7 Media references to AYBABTU
8 Video/computer games that have referenced AYBABTU
9 Ending
10 See also
11 External links
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Origins
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 in many Internet message boards. In 2000, 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"), generally suggesting someone's aggressive dominance – or self-perception or desire for such – in a particular field.
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