The early years were a strange time. The loser son of George HW Bush somehow became president, terrible bands like Crazy city and Staind had songs on the Billboard Hot 100, and we were doing it with one meme a year. In 2001 that meme was ‘All Your Base’, a Newgrounds video which ironically the bad Japanese-to-English translation from Toaplan’s 1992 Mega Drive game Zero WingToday that video is officially 20 years old.
As with most things of the time, it is difficult to pinpoint which website or bulletin board the absurdity of the Zero Wing intro. Like most internet culture at the time, it made its way into the Something Awful forums, which predate 4chan and Reddit as a hub for anonymous online discussions and common follies.
Shortly after, the intro was parodied in 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 crowdsourced Zero Wing lines in real locations and advertisements to plaster over Roberts’ thumping techno track. The original “All Your Base” video was uploaded to Flash repository Newgrounds on February 16, 2001 and immediately shot into the collective consciousness with a ridiculous dialogue like ‘Somebody set the bomb for us, “” You have no chance of survival, free up your time, “and of course” All your base is ours “, some of which were voiced by a sinister character named CATS. generated millions of views, a huge number in the time before YouTube.
The imaginary photos in the video soon became a reality, as websites for the San Francisco Chronicle USA Today The Guardian, and Wired published stories of its popularity. Then students from North Carolina University hacked into the weather reporting system of a local news station in 2004, “All your base is ours” is one of the phrases they used as digital graffiti. And now, 20 years later, it still pops up from time to time thanks to people like billionaire dork Elon Musk and Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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While its cultural cachet may not be the same as it was twenty years ago, “All Your Base” was an important precursor to the meme-filled World Wide Web we know today. It saw several creators come together and repeat a unique joke, creating everything from music to elaborately edited photos and animations to celebrate some silly lines from an obscure imported Genesis game.
“All Your Base” is indicative of an era when the Internet felt like a wild frontier rather than a corporation owned by a few large corporations. Now if you’d like to excuse me, I have to try to wrap my head around that it’s been 20 years since I first saw this video.
Start any ‘ZIG’ !! For great justice.