"All your base are belong to us" (often shortened to "All Your Base", "AYBABTU", or simply "AYB") is a broken English phrase that began an internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002, with the use of a Flash animation. The phrase is taken from the first part of a European Sega Mega Drive version of the video game Zero Wing, made in Japan by Toaplan. The words in the game were translated into English so quickly that they did not make very much sense. The words "All your base are belong to us" were at first popular on the Something Awful message forums.
Words of the game
Notable media references
The phrase and similar phrases from the game has been shown in articles, books, comics, clothing, movies, radio shows, songs, television shows, video games, webcomics, and websites.
In the year 2000, Jeffery Ray Roberts, a Kansas City computer programmer and part-time deejay aged 23, and his musical band called The Laziest Men on Mars made a techno dance tune called "Invasion of the Gabber Robots", which used some of the Zero Wing video game music by Tatsuya Uemura with a voice saying "All your base are belong to us." On February 23, 2001, Wired magazine wrote an article about the phrase being in the Flash animation, in many e-mails, Internet forums and T-shirts showing the phrase. On April 1, 2003, in Sturgis, Michigan, seven people aged between 17 and 20 placed signs all over their town that said, "All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time." They said it was an April Fools' Day joke, but not many people who saw the signs had seen the phrase before. Many people who lived in the town were angry because the United States was at war in Iraq, and police chief Eugene Alli said the signs could be "a terrorist threat depending on what someone interprets it to mean." In February 2004, businesses and schools in Raleigh, North Carolina were closed because of bad weather and they used an internet service to report it. Some North Carolina State University students and members of The Wolf Web in Raleigh, North Carolina took control of the internet service and showed the phrase in a news ticker on the television channel, News 14 Carolinas live news broadcast. On June 1, 2006, the video website YouTube was closed to fix some problems. The phrase "ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US" was shown until their problems were fixed. Some users believed the site had been taken control of by students but YouTube said "No, we haven't! Get a sense of humor!" On September 22, 2008, on the MSNBC show Countdown with Keith Olbermann, a Princeton University Professor called Paul Krugman said that what the United States Congress said about giving the banks money from the government was similar to the leader of the United States Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson saying, "All your decisions are belong to me."