The early days were a strange time. The losing son of George HW Bush somehow he became president, horrible gangs like God Crazy City i Staind I had songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and we settled for, like, a meme a year. In 2001 that meme was “All Your Base”, a Newgrounds video which ironically celebrated the poor translation from Japanese to English from Toaplan’s 1992 game Mega Drive Wing Zero. Today, this video is officially 20 years old.
As with most things of that era, it is difficult to determine which website or message board first popularized the absurdity of the Wing Zero intro. Like most Internet culture at the time, it was aimed at Something Awful forums, which were prior to sites like 4chan and Reddit as an anonymous online discussion center and general chatter.
Shortly afterwards, the introduction was parodied in a song by Something Awful poster and musician Jeffrey Ray Roberts, which in turn was used as the basis for a Bad_CRC video, which edited multimedia images of Wing Zero lines in real-world locations and ads to sink on Roberts ’amazing techno track. The original “All Your Base” video was uploaded to Flash depository Newgrounds on February 16, 2001 and instantly shot at the collective consciousness with a ridiculous dialogue like “Somebody installed the bomb on us “,” You have no chance of surviving, make your time “and, of course,” All your bases belong to us “, some of which were uttered by a sinister character named CATS This got millions of views, a large number in the time before YouTube.
The imaginary photos in the video it soon became a reality, such as Chronicle of San Francisco, USA Today, The guardian, i With cable published stories about his popularity. When students at the University of North Carolina hacked into the weather reporting system of a local news station in 2004, “All your base are belong to us” 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 Elon Musk, a billionaire i congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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While its cultural cache may not be the same as it was two decades ago, “All Your Base” was a major forerunner of the World Wide Web full of memes we know today. He saw disparate creators come together and repeat themselves in a singular joke, doing everything from music to elaborately edited photos and animations to celebrate some silly lines from an obscure Genesis import game.
“All Your Base” is indicative of an era when the Internet felt like a wild frontier rather than a business site owned by some massive corporations. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go try to wrap my head around it, as it’s been 20 years since I first saw this video.
Take off all the “ZIG” !! For great justice.