All Your Base Are Belong to Us
A hilariously broken line of video-game English that became one of the internet's first true memes. In February 2001, a techno remix and a Newgrounds video put 'All your base are belong to us' on forum signatures, Photoshopped billboards, and eventually YouTube's own maintenance page.
The phrase came from Zero Wing, a 1989 Japanese arcade shooter by Toaplan. When the game reached Europe on the Sega Mega Drive in July 1991, the port shipped with a gloriously mangled English translation: in the opening cutscene, the villain CATS announces "How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us."
An animated GIF of the scene circulated on late-90s forums like Zany Video Game Quotes and TribalWar starting around 1999. In November 2000, Kansas City programmer Jeffrey Ray Roberts set the scene to a thumping techno remix, and on February 16, 2001, a Newgrounds user called Bad_CRC posted an animated music video splicing the phrase onto real-world signs, screens, and landmarks. That video detonated the meme into the wider web and the mainstream press.
It endured as the wholesome one: no cruelty, no vulgarity, no punchline even — just a shared in-joke that instantly marked you as someone who was online in 2001. YouTube itself paid tribute, posting "ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US" as a maintenance-page message in June 2006.
Keep talking about it (Reddit)
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