"All your base are belong to us"
(sometimes abbreviated AYBABTU or simply AYB) is a stock phrase arising from a poor translation used in the English version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing, originally produced by Toaplan in 1989. The infamous quotes were taken from the European localization of the Sega Megadrive port released in 1992. (The arcade version of Zero Wing does not include the quote, nor any other dialogue; the intro for the PC-Engine version has CD quality spoken dialogue, but has a completely different introduction.) Zero Wing was never released in North America, and therefore never came to the Sega Genesis, the North American Megadrive. AYBABTU is one of the most commonly quoted examples of Engrish.
| Table of contents |
The phrase is a line from the game's introductory cut scene, which is subtitled and poorly translated. It made its first appearance on the Internet in 1998. During mid-to-late 2000, the phrase began appearing in the forums of Something Awful. In 2000, CanadianGabber group The Laziest Men on Mars created the song "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" using samples from the game (including the complete cut-scene dialogue, which by some accounts caused mp3.com to temporarily remove the track from their servers for perceived copyright violation). By the second half of February 2001 a huge number of altered pictures, GIF animations, and Macromedia Flash animations swept over the Internet - fueled in part by an online music video by someone named "Bad_CRC" for "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" - and just as suddenly seemed to slow to a crawl. It has been used as a caption for almost any photograph since the heavily overloaded word "base" (along with homonyms such as bass and compounds like base pair) seemed to make the phrase mean almost anything. Numerous persons and groups also replaced the word "base" with other topics (e.g. "all your data are belong to us," "all your vote are belong to us"), generally suggesting someone's aggressive dominance in a particular field. The cut scene transcript goes as follows:
The final phrase "for great justice" appears also to have been adopted by various groups as their slogan, and there is also some adoption of "move 'zig'" (which resembles that of "Let's Roll" - a universal command to action; the "Zig" was the name of the small fighter craft piloted by the player in Zero Wing) and "Somebody set up us the bomb" (basically "uh-oh!").
The AYBABTU phenomenon is continually declared dead, yet it is still seen on the Internet. Some people who play multiplayer games like Counter-Strike have been banned from servers for continually repeating this phrase.
On April 1, 2003, in Sturgis, Michigan, seven men aged 17 to 20 placed signs all over town that read "All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time." They said they were playing an April Fools joke by mimicking the famous Flash animation which depicted the slogan ubiquitously. Not many people who saw the signs got the joke. Many residents were upset that the signs appeared while the U.S. was at war with Iraq, and police chief Eugene Alli said the signs could be "a borderline terrorist threat depending on what someone interprets it to mean."
In 2002, AYBABTU was featured in an art exhibition called Trigger: Game Art which looked at the way computer games had influenced contemporary art. [2]
The following is a "free text" translation of the original Japanese. It is not intended to translate the exact wording of the original, but rather to capture the spirit and tone which the author seems to have been intending.