All Your Base Are Belong to Us

Origin

‘All your base are belong to us’ comes from the badly translated opening of the 1991 shoot-‘em-up Zero Wing, which reached a wide audience through its Sega Mega Drive port. The mangled English of the villain’s speech — including ‘Somebody set up us the bomb’ and the title line ‘All your base are belong to us’ — was screencapped by early web users. In 2001, those screenshots were set to a techno remix in a Flash video that spread across forums and email chains. It became one of the earliest true viral internet memes, from the pre-YouTube era.

Meaning & usage

The phrase became a template for absurd photoshops, with the broken line inserted onto signs, buildings, billboards, and products. It functions as shorthand for a hostile takeover — someone announcing, in garbled triumph, that they have seized control. Today it is used mostly as a nostalgic marker of ‘old internet’ humor, instantly recognizable to anyone who was online in the early 2000s. The broken grammar is the whole joke, and part of the appeal is deliberately keeping the Engrish intact.

Notable examples

• Photoshopped signs and product boxes bearing the phrase.
• The original 2001 Flash video and its techno remix of the intro.
• Countless callbacks in games and tech culture referencing ‘all your base.’