The early affliction was a strange time. George HW Bush’s prodigal son somehow became president, god-awful bands like Crazy Town and Staind had songs on the Billboard Hot 100, and we were content with, like, one meme a year. In 2001, the meme was ‘All Your Base’, A Newgrounds Video who ironically celebrated the weak Japanese-to-English translation of Toaplan’s Mega Drive game from 1992 Zero wing. Today, the video is officially 20 years old.
As with most things from that era, it’s hard to determine which website or message board made the absurdity of the first popular Zero wing introduction. Like most internet culture at the time, it went to the Something Awful forums, which preceded sites like 4chan and Reddit as a hub for anonymous online discussions and general jackassery.
Shortly afterwards, the intro was parodied into a song by Something Awful poster and musician Jeffrey Ray Roberts, which in turn was used as the basis for a video by Bad_CRC, which edited images of Zero wing rules in real places and advertisements to plaster over Roberts’ beating tech cut. The original “All Your Base” video was uploaded to Flash Depot Newgrounds on February 16, 2001 and immediately with the ridiculous dialogue like “SomebOdy set up the bomb for us, ” You have no chance of surviving, make your time, ‘and of course’ All your base belongs to us’, some of which were uttered by a sinister character named CATS. It got millions of views, a large number in the time before YouTube.
The imaginary photos in the video soon became a reality, as sites for the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The guardian, en Wired has published stories about its popularity. When students from the University of Carolina hacked into a local news station’s weather reporting system in 2004, “All your base belongs to us”, is one of the phrases they used as digital graffiti. And now, 20 years later, it still appears from time to time thanks to people like billionaire dork Elon Musk and Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
G / O Media can get a commission
Although the cultural closet was not two decades ago, ‘All Your Base’ was a major forerunner of the World Wide Web we know today. It has seen diverse creators come together and knock on a single joke, making everything from music to elaborate edited photos and animations to celebrate some silly lines from an obscure input Genesis game.
‘All Your Base’ is an indication of an era when the internet felt like a wild border rather than a business place owned by a few massive businesses. If you excuse me now, I should try to turn my head, because it’s been twenty years since I first saw this video.
Take down every ‘ZIG’ !! For great justice.