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All Your Base Are Belong To Us
"All your base are belong to us"
(sometimes abbreviated AYBABTU or simply AYB) is a phrase
that sparked an Internet phenomenon that occurred in 2001
and 2002. The phenomenon initially took the form of the
sentence appearing on the Something Awful Forums. Many
images were digitally altered so that the phrase was added
in, either obviously or discreetly. Eventually these were
collected together onto one site and a Flash animation
produced from them, which was widely downloaded.
The phrase arose from a poor translation
used in the English version of the Japanese video game
Zero Wing, originally produced by Toaplan in 1989. The
infamous 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, nor any
other dialogue; 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 Mega Drive.
"All Your Base" was interesting
in that it demonstrated the power of the Internet to quickly
spread idiosyncratic messages that would never have been
covered by the traditional mass media. Although the fad
has since 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.
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