As of yesterday, it’s been 20 years since ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’ was uploaded to Newgrounds. Let it sink in. And while doing so, you can also watch the video in its entirety there. It is safely stored in a Flash emulating container, so even now it is safe from the awkward fact that Flash has been discontinued.
As Ars Technica reports, the history of the video “All Your Base” is longer than just a single upload. Much of it is taken from a small GIF of the Mega Drive game Zero wing, which spread widely online due to the disastrous English translation (and the GIF itself exists due to the early emulation culture). “Early internet communities made the series fun by creating and sharing gags in which the silly text was inserted in different ways,” writes Ars author Sam Machkovech. The meme did not really start until the video uploaded on February 16, 2001 was posted on Newgrounds. “The video presents the original Sega Genesis graphics, overlaid with monotonous, machine-generated speech that reads every phrase,” Machkovech writes. “You’re on your way to destruction” in this voice are delicious silly things. “
Machkovech’s piece delves more into the history and context surrounding the video itself, which is fascinating. He also identifies the video as a bridge between the early internet meme culture – which was mostly text-based and how we got things like ROFL – and the multimedia memes we have today.
When I see it now, 20 years later, the thing that strikes me most is how culturally the video feels. It is from the era of internet culture when the whole joke got the reference; at the time, the internet was much harder to access and not the kind of culture-determining trend machine that it eventually became. Knowing the reference – and moving it to places where it does not belong – was funny, because not everyone could understand what it meant, unless of course you were part of the tribe. That kind of humor felt like the dominant way of internet discourse up to Dashcon; even now you can make people’s eyes tingle by tapping something like “the narwhal bacons at midnight” or “I love your shoelaces”. (Although “superwholock” will probably work as well.)
When social media became massively multiplayer, to borrow a phrase, the feeling of group bonding became creepy. Now you need to promote the meme to participate.