Definition
All Your Base Are Belong To Us is a broken English phrase from the 1989 Japanese video game Zero Wing. It became one of the first and most iconic internet memes in 2000-2001, when a flash animation featuring the phrase and scenes from the game went viral. The phrase spread across forums, IRC, and early internet culture, spawning t-shirts, songs, and endless parodies. It is the internet’s original absurdity — a mistranslation that became a declaration of war, a joke, and a cultural touchstone all at once.
Why It Matters
“All Your Base” was the first mainstream internet meme. Before lolcats, before Rickrolling, before TikTok, there was this flash animation with a poorly translated video game intro and a techno soundtrack. It proved that internet culture could create its own folklore from the most obscure sources. The phrase is still referenced today as a shorthand for “this is what the internet does — it takes something meaningless and makes it mean everything.” It also represents the global, cross-cultural nature of early internet humor: a Japanese game, translated badly into English, became a global phenomenon.
Example
“He quoted ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’ in a meeting in 2001. Everyone laughed. He quoted it in 2023. One person laughed. That person was 45. They exchanged a look. They were the last two people who remembered. The internet had moved on. But the base was still there. It always belonged to them.”
Related Terms
- Zero Wing — The game that started it all
- Flash Animation — The format that spread the meme
- Internet Meme — The genre this phrase helped define
- Engrish — The phenomenon of bad Japanese-to-English translation
- Viral Video — The modern format that inherited All Your Base’s legacy