Yesterday, it has been 20 years since “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” was uploaded to Newgrounds. Let it fall on your head. And while you do that, feel free to watch the video in full as well. It has been kept safe in a Flash emulation container, so even now, it is protected from the inconvenient fact that Flash has been discontinued.
How Ars Technica reports, the history of the “All Your Base” video is longer than just a single upload. Much of it is taken from a small GIF from the game Mega Drive Wing Zero, which was circulating widely online because of its disastrous English translation (and the GIF itself existed because of the initial emulation culture). “The first Internet communities made fun of the sequence by creating and sharing gag images that had the silly text inserted in various ways,” he writes. Ars author Sam Machkovech. The meme didn’t really take off until the video, uploaded on February 16, 2001, was posted on Newgrounds. “The video features the original Sega Genesis graphics, folded in a monotone voice generated by a machine reading each sentence,” writes Machkovech. “‘You are on your way to destruction’ in this voice is a deliciously silly thing.”
Machkovech’s article touches more on the story and context around the video itself, which is fascinating. He also correctly identifies the video as a bridge between the culture of the first Internet memes – which was mainly text-based and how we managed things like ROFL – and the multimedia memes we have today.
Watching now, 20 years later, what strikes me the most is how culturally dated the video looks. It is from the era of internet culture, when the whole joke was gaining reference; at that time, the internet was much more difficult to access and not the kind of culture-defining trend machine that it eventually became. Knowing the reference – and hiding it in places it didn’t belong – was funny because not everyone could figure out what it meant, unless, of course, you were part of the tribe. This kind of humor seemed to be the dominant mode of speech on the Internet until Dashcon; even now, you can make people’s eyes twitch by typing something like “midnight narwhal bacons” or “I like your laces”. (Although “superwholock” probably works, too.)
When social media became massively multiplayer, to use a phrase, that sense of belonging to the group became frightening. Now, you need to advance the meme to participate.