In 1989, Japanese game company Toaplan released Zero Wing, a side-scrolling shooter with a legendarily bad English translation. The opening cutscene featured the villain CATS declaring “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.” For eleven years, the line sat unnoticed. Then in 2000, someone on the Something Awful forums rediscovered it, and within months “All Your Base” had flooded every corner of the early internet.
It became one of the first true copypasta memes, plastered on billboards, photoshopped into newspaper photos, and chanted at gaming conventions. The phrase proved that even a thirty-second clip from an obscure Japanese shooter could, with enough community energy, become a global inside joke.
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