As the Internet began to crystallize in its modern form – which now undoubtedly supports society as we know it – its anthropology of common language and references has matured at an odd pace. But among the simple initialisms that emerged in the 90s (ROFL!) And the ecosystem of the modern multimedia world easily shared, a patchwork of users and websites had to figure out how to establish a shared referral base.
In a way, the Internet as we know it really started on February 16, 2001, 20 years ago today, when a three-word phrase exploded: “All Your Base”.
That day, a video clip featuring a robot voice aired on Newgrounds.com, one of the Internet’s first and most enduring Flash multimedia content deposits, and became one of the Internet’s most beloved videos of the 21st century. Flash has been dropped across the web browsing ecosystem, Newgrounds continues to host the original video on a secure Flash emulator, if you want to see it as originally built, rather than flipping through dozens of YouTube files.
In an online world where users were previously attracted to things like the Hamster Dance, exactly how the hell did this nonsense become one of the first genuine memes on the Internet?
REMOVE EVERY ‘ZIG’ !!
Wing ZeroThe opening sequence was widely shared on the initial Internet as a GIF small enough to fit on a 3.5 “floppy disk. KnowYourMeme
One possible reason is that the video “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” attracted the first savvy Internet users, as it originated from an unpopular video game from the 90s. Wing Zero launched on Sega Genesis in 1992 as a competent shmup comparable to arcade classics like Galaga and Type R, but went unnoticed in an American market more obsessed with series like Sonic and Madden. In the late 1990s, however, the emulation of video games on PCs changed all that. In the early years of the post-BBS Internet, underestimated 8- and 16-bit games changed hands at a breakneck pace thanks to small file sizes and 56K modems – and if you were an initial Internet user, you were probably an audience- target for activities like emulating a Sega Genesis on a Pentium II PC.
This was the first step in exposing the world to Wing ZeroThe text was inadvertently hilarious, translated from Japanese to English by an apparent amateur. Classic Japanese games are full of bad translations, and even mega-successful publishers like Nintendo are guilty of letting bad phrases fall into classic games. But Wing Zero it deeply slaughtered other examples of crazy translation errors thanks to its dramatic opening sequence that opposes the generic “CAPTAIN” to a half-robot and half-demon in a tunic called “CATS”.
His craziness circulated in the early years of the Internet as a small GIF, with each of his silly phrases (“How are you, gentlemen!”, “Someone set the bomb for us”) having a significant weight in terms of strange clauses and punctuation absent. Early Internet communities scoffed at the sequence by creating and sharing gag images that had the silly text inserted in a number of ways. But it wasn’t until the February 2001 video, uploaded by a user using “Bad-CRC”, that the meme’s appeal really started to explode. The video features the original Sega Genesis graphics, dubbed with a monotone machine-generated voice reading each sentence. “You’re on your way to destruction” in that voice is a deliciously silly thing.
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Much of the fun in the original video comes from its altered images, where the eccentricity of the poorly translated game introduction collides with pop culture. Bill Gates’ infamous photo became quite popular during the early years of the Internet, for example.
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Who doesn’t love a BSOD that tells who their entire base belongs to now?
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Many Windows errors in the 2001 video.
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The re-release of Star Wars films in the late 1990s meant cereal links, which were perfect for an All Your Base memeification.
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Smoking kills. By great justice.
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I would like to buy a zig.
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Meme of the year.
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Certainly, a turnaround in the idea that we were all on the way to destruction.
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Someone set up the chicken for us.
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Main excitement of conspiracy theory.
After this 30-second sequence ends (admittedly cutting out some of the silly original text), the video’s background music turns into an impactful techno track. The original 16-bit visuals darken and a low-resolution image of planet Earth consumes the screen for some reason. Then the whole thing explodes. “ALL YOUR BASE, BASE, B-BASE, ALL YOUR BASE, BELONGS TO US”, shouts the robot voice, as if it has become a member of The Prodigy, while the Flash animation turns into a Photoshop frenzy of real life images newly emblazoned with Wing Zeroseveral poorly translated sentences. These remixed images are certainly from an era; George W. Bush, Al Gore and OJ Simpson appear in some, as well as a Windows “blue screen of death” rewritten to mainly contain the game’s text.
WE WON SIGN.
The video credits include about 20 additional usernames that stink in 2001, including DrMeithos, The Yellow Yell and Generic Superhero, giving credit to the “shit” community that played with the “All Your Base” phenomenon in online circles smaller and generated so many silly images for this video to enjoy. Furthermore, the entire audio sequence of the video – the introduction with a robot voice, perfectly sequenced with the Genesis game and then its conversion to a powerful techno – was done by someone else, a group of anonymous Internet users who went through The Laziest Men on Mars.
Bad-CRC may be honored as the original video uploader, but The Laziest Men on Mars helped establish a significant trend in online meme sharing: reliance on crowdsourcing and remixing. The meme wouldn’t exist without Wing ZeroStill, dozens of people pulled and distorted this original view as if they were Internet taffy, to the point that neither the game’s creators nor any meme contributor took credit for the phenomenon.
It wasn’t until the Flash video appeared, epitomizing the furious efforts of a community spread across forums and file-sharing services, that the rest of the Internet world could actually find and digest this patchwork of WTF. Newgrounds was one of many dump sites for Flash animations, making it easier for friends to share links not only to videos, but also free online games – usually in ways that the school’s computer labs didn’t necessarily block, which led to children to devour and share their favorites when teachers did not carefully watch students’ screens. And in the case of “All Your Base”, his general lack of vulgarity made it easier to reach children without arousing the parents’ ire. It was not like Congressional hearings in the early 1990s against violent and sexual video games. It was just … weird.
And, wow, it still is. Yes, the 20th anniversary of this video is likely to make you feel old as trash, but that doesn’t mean that the video itself has aged badly. There is still something timeless about the eccentricity and innocence of so many Internet pioneers who submitted a poorly translated game. And at a time when memes that are widespread often fall into cruelty or shock value, it is good to look back, at a time when memes were merely stupid.