The first daughters were a strange time. Losing son of George HW Bush somehow became president, horrible bands like Crazy Town and Stained there were songs on the Billboard Hot 100, and we settle for, like, one meme a year. In 2001, this meme was “All Your Base”, a Newgrounds video who ironically celebrated the poor translation from Japanese to English of Toaplan’s 1992 Mega Drive game Wing Zero. Today, this video is officially 20 years old.
Like most things at that time, it is difficult to define which site or message board popularized the absurdity of Wing Zero introduction. Like most Internet culture at the time, it hit the horrible forums, which preceded places like 4chan and Reddit as an anonymous and dumb online discussion center in general.
Soon after, the intro was parodied into a song from the Something Awful poster and musician Jeffrey Ray Roberts, which in turn was used as the basis for a video by Bad_CRC, which edited images of Wing Zero lines in real-world locations and ads to cast on Roberts’ techno track. The original video “All Your Base” was uploaded to Flash depository Newgrounds on February 16, 2001 and instantly soared in collective consciousness with ridiculous dialogues like “Somebody set the bomb for us “,” You have no chance to survive, make your time “and, of course,” All your bases belong to us “, some of which were said by a sinister character called CATS. This got millions of views, a huge number before YouTube.
The imaginary photos in the video soon became reality, such as sites for San Francisco Chronicle, USA today, The Guardian, and Wired published stories about its popularity. When students at North Carolina University broke into the weather forecasting system of a local news station in 2004, “All your bases are ours” is one of the phrases they used as digital graffiti. And now, 20 years later, it still appears from time to time thanks to people like dumb billionaire Elon Musk and Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
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Although its cultural prestige may not be the same as two decades ago, “All Your Base” was an important precursor to the world wide web full of memes that we know today. He saw disparate creators come together and iterate on a unique joke, doing everything from music to elaborately edited photos and animations to celebrate some silly lines from an obscure game imported from Genesis.
“All Your Base” is indicative of an era when the Internet seemed like a wild frontier, rather than a place of business belonging to some huge corporations. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to try to understand the fact that it’s been 20 years since I first saw this video.
Take out all the ‘ZIG’ !! By great justice.