The video “ All your bases belong to us ” is now 20 years old

The beginnings were a strange time. George HW Bush’s Loser Son sort of became president, horrible bands like Crazy city and Task had songs on the Billboard Hot 100, and we stuck with, like, one meme a year. In 2001, that meme was “All Your Base”, a Newgrounds video which ironically celebrated the poor translation from Japanese to English from Toaplan’s Mega Drive 1992 game Wing zero. Today, this video is officially 20 years old.

As with most things of this era, it’s hard to determine which website or message board first popularized the absurdity. Wing zero intro. Like most internet cultures at the time, it made its way to the Something Awful forums, which predated places like 4chan and Reddit as a hub for anonymous online discussions and general jackassery.

Soon after, the intro was parodied into a song by the poster for Something Awful and musician Jeffrey Ray Roberts, which in turn was used as the basis for a video by Bad_CRC, which edited footage from Wing zero lines in real places and commercials to smear on Roberts’ techno track. The original “All Your Base” video was uploaded to the Flash Newgrounds repository on February 16, 2001 and instantly exploded into the collective consciousness with a ridiculous dialogue like “Somebody set us the bomb ”,“ You have no chance of surviving, do your time ”, and of course“ All your bases belong to us ”, some of which were uttered by a sinister character named CATS. He garnered millions of views, a huge number before YouTube.

The imaginary photos in the video quickly became reality, as websites for the Chronicle of San Francisco, USA today, The Guardian, and Wired published stories about its popularity. When the students of the University of North Carolina hacked into the weather reporting system of a local news station in 2004, “All your bases belong to us” is one of the expressions they used as digital graffiti. And now, 20 years later, he still pops up every now and then thanks to people like billionaire dork Elon Musk and Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

While its cultural cachet may not be the same as it was two decades ago, “All Your Base” was an important precursor to the World Wide Web filled with memes we know today. It’s seen disparate creators come together and iterate over a singular joke, ranging from music to painstakingly edited photos and animations to celebrate a few silly lines from an obscure Genesis import game.

“All Your Base” is indicative of a time when the Internet looked like a wild frontier rather than a place of business owned by a few large corporations. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to try to understand that it has been 20 years since I saw this video for the first time.

Take off all the “ZIG” !! For great justice.