Video games have been around since the early 1970s, and when an industry has been around for so long, there's bound to be a healthy share of inside jokes. In the early days of gaming, these jokes were shared around on the playground, or read about in a variety of popular gaming magazines, and with the dawn of the internet, these jokes became more widespread than ever, cropping up on early forum pages. Nowadays, the internet and social media have made information instantly shareable, which had lead to the creation of memes, some of the most iconic of which hail from the realm of video games. With Nintendo Switch Online's latest additions, players can now experience one of the most famous video game memes of all time for themselves.
Created in 1989, Zero Wing is a side-scrolling arcade shooter developed by Toaplan. A few years later, in 1991, Zero Wing would be ported to the Sega Genesis, featuring a brand new introductory cinematic. This new introduction to Zero Wing would go on to be one of the most quoted video game sequences of all time, and one of the most iconic video game memes of the last two decades.
Zero Wing's Iconic "All Your Base Are Belong To Us"
Zero Wing was first released into Japanese arcades by Namco in 1989. At the time of its release, Zero Wing didn't stir up too much conversation. The game was a solid side-scrolling shooter, and an impressive one considering that Toaplan had never made a game in that genre before. However, the 1991 European version of Zero Wing would become infamous across the gaming industry, all thanks to some unfortunate translations.
According to Zero Wing's composers, the game's infamous translations were handled by a Toaplan employee that mainly handled overseas business, and was primarily in charge of exporting the game. Apparently, this employee's English wasn't the best, resulting in Zero Wing's notoriously funny mistranslations, the most famous of which is, of course, the line, "All your base are belong to us."
More accurately translated to "With the help of Federation government forces, CATS has taken all of your bases," "All you base are belong to us" is the most iconic in a long list of hilariously bad translations that are prevalent throughout the Namco-published Zero Wing. A few other examples include the lines "Somebody set up us the bomb," "You have no chance to survive make your time," and "Main screen turn on."
By the early 2000s, a GIF depicting the "All your base are belong to us" segment appeared online, being quickly shared around on the forums of the site Something Awful, one of the first comedy blog sites to really gain traction on the internet. The meme only grew in popularity over the next two decades, with the advent of social media allowing even more people than ever to join in on the joke. Over the last 20 years, "All your base are belong to us" has cropped up in a variety of movies, TV shows, and other video games, as well as being used by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019, who tweeted the infamous phrase in response to a poll revolving around tax rates.
Nintendo Switch Online might not be a perfect service, and it might not be successfully justifying its hefty price tag to everyone, but at least players can now see the "All your base are belong to us" meme for themselves now. All they need to do is subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online's expansion pack service, navigate their way over to the Sega Genesis section, and boot up Zero Wing.