All your base are belong to us

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Template:TOCright "All your base are belong to us" (sometimes referred to as "All Your Base" and often abbreviated AYBABTU, AYBAB2U, or simply AYB) is a phrase that sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002. The text is taken from the opening cut-scene of the English version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing. The translation of this cut-scene was so poor many found it humorous. The game was originally produced by Toaplan in 1989. Groups of game enthusiasts began digitally altering various images to include the phrase. Eventually, these images were collected together onto one site, Tribalwar, and a Flash animation produced from them, which was widely downloaded.

Image:Aybabtu.png The well-known quotations were taken from the European localization of the Sega Mega Drive port released in 1992. The arcade version of Zero Wing does not include the quote, though it does include an equally butchered ending; 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 version of the Mega Drive.

AYB is interesting because it demonstrated the Internet's power to spread idiosyncratic messages rapidly that would never have been covered by the traditional mass media. Although the fad has died down, the phrase continues to be one of the most commonly quoted examples of "Engrish." The phrase is also often used as a battle cry on many competitive video games, particularly ones played over the Internet. Guild Wars has even made it a skill for the warrior class, where the character shouts "For Great Justice!" (a reference to another quote from Zero Wing, "Take off every Zig for great justice.") and thereby causes adrenaline to gain twice as fast for a short while.

AYB is often cited as an example of a meme, a self-propagating piece of information, because of its broad, rapid spread across the Internet and around the world. It has also been recognized as a snowclone, wherein a familiar phrase is modified by substituting new words into the phrase (for example, "All your bug are belong to me" as used on Wikipedia's MediaZilla main page).

Newgrounds' Flash portal spawned many variants of the Flash animation with a wide range of content, creativity, and quality.

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History

Image:AllYourBaseAnimated.gif The phrase is a line from the game's introductory cut scene, which is subtitled and poorly translated (see Engrish). It made its first appearance on the Internet in 1998. During mid- to late 1998, the phrase began to appear on many Internet forums. In 2000, Jared and 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 (in addition to photos of actual sightings) 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. 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," "all your oil are belong to U.S."), generally suggesting someone's aggressive dominance — either real or imagined — in a particular field. Template:-

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AYB in the media

Image:All your base are belong to us at US-50.jpg Image:Wrestlemaniaxseven000.jpg

Due to its immense popularity, the phrase or some variation of the lines from the game has been seen in innumerable articles, books, comics, clothing, movies, radio shows, songs, television shows, video games, webcomics, and websites. However, few have actually drawn any legitimate media attention. A selection of those that have garnered such coverage follows; a Google search will turn up thousands more hits on individual websites.

  • On 2001-02-23, Wired magazine provided an early report on the phenomenon in an article entitled "When Gamer Humor Attacks," which covered everything from the Flash animation to its spread through e-mail and Internet forums to T-shirts bearing the phrase.Template:Ref
  • On 2003-04-01, 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 Fool's joke by mimicking the famous Flash animation that ubiquitously depicted the slogan. Not many people who saw the signs were familiar with the joke, however. 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."Template:Ref
  • When Google launched Google Base in October 2005, the phrase was twisted into "All Your Base Are Belong To Google" by search industry watchers such as John Battelle.Template:Ref
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Related phrases and usage

The final phrase "for great justice" has been adopted by various groups as their slogan, and there is also some adoption of "move 'zig'" (which resembles "let's roll" — a universal command to action; "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!").

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Transcripts and translations

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See Zero Wing (translations) for transcripts of the opening and closing scenes as well as the original Japanese text and various English translations.

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Footnotes

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External links

As with media and other references, the number of sites containing a reference to AYB is very large. Accordingly, the following are links considered representative without being redundant or trite.

de:All your base are belong to us eo:All your base are belong to us es:All your base are belong to us et:All your base are belong to us fr:All your base are belong to us he:All your base are belong to us it:All your base are belong to us ja:All your base are belong to us ko:All your base are belong to us nl:All your base are belong to us no:All your base are belong to us pl:All your base are belong to us pt:All your base are belong to us sv:All your base are belong to us zh-min-nan:All your base are belong to us

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