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"All your base are belong to us" is a stock phrase arising from an interesting translation used in the Sega Genesis version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing (the arcade version of Zero Wing does not include the quote). It is sometimes abbreviated AYBABTU. Zero Wing was never released in North America. The infamous quotes were taken from the European localization of the Sega Genesis (called Sega Megadrive in Japan and Europe) port.
The phrase is simply one line from the game's introductory cut scene, which is subtitled and poorly translated. In late 2000 and early 2001 a huge number of altered pictures, GIF animations, and Macromedia Flash animations exploiting the popularity of this phrase swept over the Internet - fueled in part by the use of the phrase in an online music video by the Gabber group The Laziest Men on Mars - and just as suddenly seemed to slow to a crawl. It has been used as a caption for almost any photograph since the heavily overloaded word "base" (along with homonyms such as bass and compounds like base pair) seemed to make the phrase mean almost anything. Numerous persons and groups also replaced the word "base" with other topics (e.g. "all your data are belong to us," "all your vote are belong to us"), generally suggesting someone's aggressive dominance in a particular field.
It is one of the most commonly quoted examples of Engrish, which is the use of English poorly translated from another language.
The cut scene transcript goes as follows:
The AYBABTU phenomenon is continually declared dead, yet it is still seen on the Internet. Some people who play multiplayer games like Counter-Strike have been banned from servers for continually repeating this phrase.
On April 1, 2003, in Sturgis, Michigan, seven men aged 17 to 20 placed signs all over town that read "All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time." They said they were playing an April Fools joke by mimicking the famous Flash animation which depicted the slogan ubiquitously. Unfortunately for the young men, not many people got the joke. Many residents were upset that the signs appeared while the U.S. was at war with Iraq, and police chief Eugene Alli said the signs could be "a borderline terrorist threat depending on what someone interprets it to mean." [1]
Professional video games that have referenced AYBABTU are Quake III Team Arena, where an add-on level reads All Your Base Are Belong To Us, and Warcraft III, where the single player victory code is AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs, while defeat is SomeBodySetUpUsTheBomb. Another is Max Payne, where a sign in the training level advertising a "Tar Cafe" gives its address as "615 ALL YOUR BASE ARE..."
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