Had the video game Zero Wing been as big as its most famous quote, the Sega Genesis might have won the 1990s console wars and changed the course of video game history.
Alas, it was a minor success at best.
Zero Wing is a horizontal side-scrolling shooter game developed by Toaplan and published by Namco as a Japanese arcade game in 1989. You played as a fighter pilot fending off an alien invasion of Earth by cyborg space pirates known as CATS. Besides the original Japanese arcade game, there was an American arcade game, and it was ported to the Sega Genesis (AKA Sega Mega Drive outside the US) in 1991. It was this port, specifically the European version, that would give Zero Wing its utterly unique legacy.
Each version of the game was slightly different from the rest and in the European Mega Drive port, one of the cutscenes in the beginning depicting the invasion featured the CATS leader coming on the screen and saying, “All your base are belong to us.” It was clearly just a bad translation from Japanese to English, but something about this clumsy phrase drove the early internet wild.
Zero Wing’s meme history dates back to 1998. According to Know Your Meme, “The first GIF of the opening sequence is rumored to have originated on the Rage Games website in early 1998.” From there, the site Zany Video Game Quotes popularized the GIF after posting it in late 1998 or early 1999.
“This became an ultra-viral meme that was pre-social media, so it spread on forums and chatrooms and hub sites like Newgrounds,” Know Your Meme editor-in-chief Don Caldwell told Polygon in a phone interview.
‘All your base…” really exploded in 2000. That’s when the website Overclocked.org dubbed the GIF with an audio track reading the lines from the cutscene. Then a member of the Tribal War Forums named Bad_CRC released a music video remix of “All your base are belong to us” on the website Newgrounds in 2001. As Caldwell explained, “The remix video gathered up all the different ‘All your base’ memes and combined them with a banger song. This was the first time this happened, so it was like a perfect storm. It’s a huge milestone in internet meme history.”
The music video on Newgrounds has garnered nearly three million views. A few years after its posting, YouTube came along. It was reposted there, where it has earned more than eight million views. Its impact was incredibly widespread as remix videos have since become a staple of internet culture. “I would put this in the top ten memes ever, and it’s probably the biggest video game meme ever,” said Caldwell.
As for why an obscure port from a relatively unknown game took off in this way, Caldwell explained that the obscurity was an asset. “Zero Wing wasn’t a very big game and that’s a key part of the meme’s success. I grew up during this era and I never heard of Zero Wing until this meme. If you had been exposed to this intro sequence as a child in 1992, it wouldn’t have popped off on the internet later because everybody would have already been familiar with it.”
Over 20 years after the meme’s biggest moment, the impact of “All your base are belong to us” can still be felt in the way memes travel and the way they still get musical remixes. Yet the virality of the meme itself has long since faded into the annals of internet history. According to Know Your Meme’s internet research, every year, fewer and fewer people search for and use the meme. The site even jokingly called it “endangered.” It may fall completely out of fashion one day, but it will always be immortalized on Polygon’s list of the 100 greatest video game quotes.
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