All Your Base Are Belong to Us

“All your base are belong to us” is a broken-English line from the opening cutscene of the European Mega Drive version of Zero Wing. In the scene, the villain CATS announces that he has taken the player’s bases; the Japanese line more naturally means that CATS has taken all of them.

The game supplied the source in 1991, but the meme came later. An animated GIF of the cutscene circulated through gaming sites including Zany Video Game Quotes in late 1998 or early 1999. The surviving record does not establish an exact first day, so the date shown here is an approximate late-1998 marker rather than a claim about one definitive first post.

The phrase moved from quote pages into participatory forum culture during 2000. OverClocked published a Zero Wing dub project in June, while users on Something Awful and TribalWar placed the text into signs, ads, error screens and other images. The joke was no longer only the bad translation: it was the collision between an authoritative-looking picture and absurdly confident grammar.

Jeffrey Ray Roberts of The Laziest Men on Mars turned the dialogue into the gabber track “Invasion of the Gabber Robots.” On February 16, 2001, Bad_CRC uploaded a Flash music video to Newgrounds using images made by members of a Tribes forum. That remix was the breakout artifact, carrying a scattered forum joke to a much wider audience.

The catchphrase then escaped its original scene. News outlets covered it in 2001; pranksters put variants on television tickers, signs and T-shirts; YouTube used “ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US” during maintenance in 2006. Later references usually work as instant nostalgia for the handmade, pre-social-media web.

The line is wrong in a compact, memorable way, and CATS delivers it with total villainous certainty. Its grammar is also easy to mutate: replace “base” or “us,” keep the sentence skeleton, and almost any image becomes part of the joke.

People use it to announce a takeover, exaggerate a win, parody corporate ownership or signal affection for early internet culture. Related Zero Wing lines such as “Somebody set up us the bomb” and “For great justice” often appear alongside it.