All your base are belong to us Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
'']]"All your base are belong to us" (sometimes 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 website message boards. 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 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 quotes were taken from the European localization of the Sega Megadrive 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 Megadrive.)
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 a line from the game's introductory cut scene, which is subtitled and poorly translated. It made its first appearance on the Internet in 1998. During mid-to-late 2000, the phrase began appearing in the forums of Something Awful. 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 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. The phenomenon was then fueled primarily by an online music video by someone named "Bad_CRC" for "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" — and just as suddenly seemed to slow to a crawl. 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 in a particular field.
The cut scene transcript goes as follows:
The final phrase "for great justice" appears also to have been adopted by various groups as their slogan, and there is also some adoption of "move 'zig'" (which resembles that of "Let's Roll" — a universal command to action; the "Zig" was the name of the small fighter craft piloted by the player in Zero Wing) and "Somebody set up us the bomb" (basically "uh-oh!").
The AYBABTU phenomenon is continually declared dead, yet it is still seen on the Internet. Some people who play multiplayer games like Counter-Strike have been banned from servers for continually repeating this phrase.
On April 1, 2003, in Sturgis, Michigan, seven men aged 17 to 20 placed signs all over town that read "All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time." They said they were playing an April Fools joke by mimicking the famous Flash animation which depicted the slogan ubiquitously. Not many people who saw the signs got the joke. Many residents were upset that the signs appeared while the U.S. was at war with Iraq, and police chief Eugene Alli said the signs could be "a borderline terrorist threat depending on what someone interprets it to mean." [1]
The phrase has been spotted as graffiti on various structures, such as on a former train bridge over the Connecticut River between Hadley and Northampton, Massachusetts, an area with several colleges in close proximity. An automated news ticker on a North Carolina cable channel was even "hacked" to display the message on television. [1]
In 2002, AYBABTU was featured in an art exhibition called Trigger: Game Art which looked at the way computer games had influenced contemporary art. [1]
Note that the majority of the following games were designed by Western studios. The phrase is little-known in Japan.
The crudity and bluntness of the famous mistranslation is in stark contrast to CATS' cool, caustic irony in the original text. The difference is especially vivid in the line corresponding to "All your base are belong to us." In the original line, CATS uses polite Japanese and insinuates that the Federation army (presumably an ally of the Captain) was treacherously co-opted into betraying the bases.
It also appears from the original text that CATS may be the name of an organization, not just of the particular cyborg villain appearing on the screen (as is the popular interpretation among English speakers).
The following is a "free text" translation of the original Japanese. It is not intended to translate the exact wording of the original, but rather to capture the spirit and tone which the author seems to have been intending.
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