All Your Base Are Belong to Us
The mangled-English line from the 1989 Mega Drive game Zero Wing — and the first viral internet gaming meme.
Origine
Zero Wing is an obscure side-scrolling shooter from Toaplan, ported to the Sega Mega Drive in 1991 with a comically bad English translation of its opening cutscene. The villain CATS announces: 'All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.' In early 2001 the cutscene clip began circulating on Something Awful and other forums, was set to music by a fan, and exploded into one of the first true internet memes — the music video racked up tens of millions of views (huge for 2001 broadband), the phrase appeared on news sites, in newspaper crosswords, and as graffiti on government buildings. The Wikipedia page is one of the early canonical entries for internet meme history.
Folosire modernă
The phrase is sometimes used straight as a humorous 'we're taking over' line. More often it is reference-as-pedigree — citing the meme marks the speaker as someone who was around early-2000s internet. The grammar mistake itself ('belong to us' as a verb construction) is the marker.
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