0:00:00 - (Matt Johnson): Foreign welcome to Podcast awesome where we chat about icons, design, tech, business and nerdery with members of the Font awesome team. I'm your host Matt Johnson and today I have a little bit of a little bit of a cough so I have that nice extra deep Barry White tone. Today we are going to do another one of those nerd culture deep dives and dive into the mainframe to trace the roots of one of the Internet's earliest and most gloriously awkward memes.

0:00:42 - (Matt Johnson): All your bass are belong to us.

0:00:45 - (B): And now a story that'll make no sense whatsoever. All your bass are belong to us. Fox's Rick Fulbaum tries to explain why what this means don't belong to us.

0:00:56 - (C): It's so cool a phrase. Even the President is using it. Or is he? All your bas are belong to us. On Uncle Sam, on Bill Gates, on T shirts, billboards. Come on, say it. Everybody else is.

0:01:10 - (D): All your bases belong to us is is a the web equivalent of people watching Budweiser commercials and going around and saying what's up to everyone. It's the exact same concept.

0:01:22 - (Matt Johnson): So I'll be honest that somehow I missed this meme altog the first time around because I was too busy falling off the couch laughing my ass off at the fence. Ler Films GI Joe PSAs around the same time Mr. Bottom Massage Machine go what the hell? But I caught up to this one about 10 years ago and man, I'm feeling a little sad that I missed out on all the joy. But anyway, that sentence all your bass are belong to us somehow manages to be both completely wrong and somehow totally right, and the phrase exploded across the Internet like a sprite glitch in a Mega Man Speedrun.

0:02:04 - (Matt Johnson): But where did it come from? Why did it go viral before going viral was even a thing?

0:02:11 - (E): So a meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture, and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. Although Richard Dawkins invented the term meme and developed meme theory, he has not claimed that idea was entirely novel, and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. I don't need to tell you guys this.

0:02:37 - (Matt Johnson): You're smart cookies.

0:02:37 - (E): You already know this stuff.

0:02:40 - (Matt Johnson): But what's up with these bases and who do they belong to? What exactly are our bases and why did the bases belong to them? The phrase all your base are belong to us originates from a 1989 Japanese arcade shoot em up style game called Zero Wing, and the game was developed by Toe Plan and ported to the SEGA Mega Drive. That's the SEGA Genesis for those of us who are on this side of the Pacific in 1992 now, Zero Wing was.

0:03:19 - (Matt Johnson): I mean, it was a solid, but kind of unremarkable side scroller. The kind of game where you pilot a spaceship and you blow up evil robots and, you know, rinse and repeat. What did stand out, however, was the game's intro sequence, specifically the English translation of it. So here are some of the actual lines from the intro.

0:03:50 - (F): What happened?

0:03:52 - (G): Someone set up us the bug. We get signal.

0:03:56 - (F): What?

0:03:58 - (G): Main screen turn on.

0:03:59 - (Matt Johnson): It's you.

0:04:00 - (F): How are you, gentlemen? All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction. What you say you have no chance to survive. Make your time.

0:04:18 - (Matt Johnson): Perfect. I kind of imagined this coming out if someone were to feed a couple lines of a Shakespeare play into a speak and spell with a low battery and bad wiring.

0:04:30 - (F): R A I N. That is correct.

0:04:33 - (Matt Johnson): The line all your bass are belong to us was a translation of this. Roughly, all your bases now belong to cats. And Cats, by the way, is the name of the villainous alien overlord who shows up in the game to taunt humanity before blasting us into pixelated oblivion. Not that Cats is a particularly menacing bad guy name. I mean, I think of Cats. I'm thinking of like, furry little buddies, you know, not. Not a bad guy. Now fast forward to the late 90s and the early 2000s, and the web is still kind of in its awkward teenage phase. Dial up is screaming in your ears and forums like something awful. And Newgrounds are the watering holes of meme culture.

0:05:22 - (Matt Johnson): In 2000, a user named Bad CRC posted a techno remix on Newgrounds called Invasion of the Gabber Robots, which sampled lines from the Zero Wing intro. And then soon after, folks on forums and IRC chat started creating photoshopped images of everything from street signs to Starbucks cups with the phrase, all your bays are belong to us. And then came the big bang. A flash video by Zany Video game quotes in 2001, which featured the song over a slideshow of doctored images featuring the iconic phrase.

0:06:25 - (Matt Johnson): And you know the story from there. The Internet explodes. I mean, for the nerds, anyway, I think robots are sexy. And by early 2001, the meme was everywhere from T shirts to campus computer labs and even being referenced in a Wired article.

0:06:44 - (E): And you really know when a meme makes an impact. When a politician can reference it and get the joke to land. In 2019, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted all your base are belonging to us along with an alien emoji. And all in response to poll showing surprising Republican support for her tax the super rich proposal. So it looks like the meme jumped timelines into the 21st century.

0:07:13 - (Matt Johnson): All your Base wasn't just funny because of the bad translation. It hit all the sweet spots of, you know, nostalgic gamer culture, early meme markers, and a growing community hungry for ridiculous and shareable weirdness. It became a digital inside joke. I don't know, kind of part protest, part parody, and all nonsense. So what does all this mean? All youl Base was a herald, a banner carrier, one of the first truly global memes that emerged from the weird corners of Internet subculture and went fully mainstream.

0:07:48 - (Matt Johnson): It reminded us that translation errors can be hilarious and shared experiences can be hilariously nonsensical, and that sometimes broken language speaks more clearly than perfect grammar ever could. Now go forth and set up us the bomb. That's actually kind of hard to say.

0:08:09 - (G): Someone set up us the bomb. We get signal.

0:08:15 - (Matt Johnson): This has been a deep dive episode of Podcast Awesome. That's, you know, just for funsies. The podcast is produced and edited by me, Matt Johnson. The Podcast awesome theme song is composed by Ronnie Martin. The music interstitials were written by Zach Malm, and the audio mastering was done by Chris Ends at Lemon Productions. And until then, remember, you have no chance to survive. Make your time.

0:08:49 - (F): All your base don't belong to us all your base, your base, base, base all your base don't belong to us all your base, your base, base, base all your base don't belong to us all your base your face all your base.