A commemoration of great justice: 20 years later you remember ‘All Your Base’

When the internet began to crystallize in its modern form – one that now underpins society as we know it – the anthropology of common language and references declined at a strange pace. But between the simple initiatives that emerged in the 90s (ROFL!), And the modern world’s ecosystem of easily shared multimedia, a patchwork connection of users and websites had to figure out how to establish a base of shared references.

In some ways, the Internet, as we know it, really started on February 16, 2001, 20 years ago, when a three-word phrase blew up: “All Your Base.”

On that day, a robo-voice music video aired on Newgrounds.com, one of the Internet’s earliest and longest-running dumps for Flash multimedia content, and became one of the most beloved Internet videos of the 21st century. Although Flash support has since been scrapped across the entire ecosystem across the Internet, Newgrounds continues to present the original video in a secure Flash emulator, if you want to see it as originally built, instead of being scoured by dozens of YouTube scroll slides.

In an online world where users used to be attracted to the Hamster Dance, exactly how did the absurd become one of the internet’s first bona fide memes?

TAKE OFF EVERY ‘ZIG’ !!

Zero wingThe opening series was widely shared on the early internet as a GIF small enough to fit on a 3.5 “chip.

KnowYourMeme

One possible reason is that the video “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” appealed to the earliest Internet users’ smartest users, as it comes from an unpopular 90s video game. Zero wing introduced at the Sega Genesis in 1992 as a capable “shmup” comparable to arcade classics such as Galaga and R-type, but it flew under the radar in an American market that is more obsessed with series like Sonic and Madden. By the late ’90s, however, the emulation of video games on computers had changed all that. Over the earliest post-BBS internet, underrated 8-bit and 16-bit games switched owners at a crazy rate thanks to small file sizes and 56K modems – and if you were an early internet user, you were probably a target audience for activities such as following a Sega Genesis on a Pentium II powered computer.

It was the first step in exposing the world Zero wing‘s unintentionally hilarious text, translated from Japanese to English by an apparent amateur. Classic Japanese games are riddled with bad translations, and even mega-successful publishers like Nintendo are guilty of slipping bad phrases into otherwise classic games. But Zero wing a good example of other mistranslations thanks to the dramatic opening sequence that places the generic “CAPTAIN” against a half-robot, half-demon creature in a cloak called “CATS”.

The madness spread on the early internet like a little GIF, with each of its silly phrases (“How are you my lords !!”, “Someone set up the bomb for us”) that carry considerable weight in terms of weirdness placed provisions and missing punctuation. Early internet communities had fun with the series by creating and sharing gags on which the silly text was inserted in different ways. But only in the February 2001 video, as uploaded by a user who went through ‘Bad-CRC’, did the profession of meme really start to explode. The video presents the original Sega Genesis graphics, overlaid with monotonous, machine-generated speech that reads every phrase. “You are on the way to destruction” in this voice are delicious silly things.

After concluding this 30-second series (albeit cut off from the original, silly text), the background music of the video changes into a very quiet techno track. The original 16-bit footage fades to black, and a low-resolution image of planet Earth uses the screen for some reason. Then the whole thing explodes. “ALL YOUR BASIS, BASIS, BASIS, ALL YOUR BASIS, BELONG TO US,” shouts the robo voice, as if it’s become a member of The Prodigy, while the Flash animation becomes a Photoshop frenzy of real images . newly decorated with Zero wing‘s various incorrectly translated phrases. These mixed images are definitely of an era; George W. Bush, Al Gore and OJ Simpson appear in a few, as well as a Windows “blue screen of death” rewritten to mostly contain the text of the game.

WE GET SIGNAL.

The video’s credits include about 20 additional usernames that apply to the year 2001, including DrMeithos, The Yellow Yell, and Generic Superhero, which give credit to the “shitposting” community that played the “All Your Base” phenomenon in smaller online circles has. so many silly images generated for this video to exploit. What’s more, the entire soundtrack of the video – the robo-voice intro, perfectly followed by the Genesis game, and then its acquisition in a great techno – was made by someone else, a group of anonymous internet users who by The Laziest Men on Mars has gone.

Bad-CRC is possibly remembered as the original uploader of the video, but The Laziest Men on Mars helped establish a significant trend in the sharing of online memes: a reliance on crowdsourcing and remixing. The meme would not exist Zero wingThe original content, but dozens of people pulled and twisted the original vision like so many internet taffy, to the point that neither the creators of the game nor any single collaborator could give credit for the phenomenon.

Only when the Flash video appeared, in which the furious efforts of a community such as spreading across forums and file-sharing services were synthesized, could the rest of the internet world actually find and consume this smorgasbord of WTF. Newgrounds was one of the many dumping grounds for Flash animations, making it easier for friends to not only share links to videos, but also free online games – usually in a way that computer labs have not necessarily blocked, which led children to devour and share. favorites if teachers did not keep a close eye on the screens of students. And in the case of ‘All Your Base’, the general lack of vulgarity has made it easier to reach children without drawing parental anger. It was not like in the early 1990s congressional hearings against violent and sexual video games. It was just … weird.

And it still is. Yes, the 20th anniversary of this video will probably make you feel old as dirty, but that does not mean that the video itself has aged badly. There is still something timeless about the madness and innocence of so many pioneers on the internet who are sending up a poorly translated game. And in a time when widespread memes so often amount to cruelty or shock value, it’s nice to look back on a time when memes were simply stupid.