For Great Justice: A Partial Origin Story of Gaming's Original Internet Meme
A look back at our collective fascination with a threat in broken English, as an alien took possession of all our base.
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Ridicule, remixes, and rants
Teel would post new images every few days (a process he describes as "incredibly time-consuming"), and eventually the site gained sufficient popularity that readers would submit their own screenshot contributions to add to the index. It was this submission process that resulted in Zero Wing's English version making its way to ZVGQ, among other sites.
"The quote was originally contributed by a guy who went by 'Seymont,' who also contributed it to another game quote site that was around contemporaneously with mine called Whazzat!" recalls Teel. The webmasters immediately recognized the appeal of Zero Wing (which appeared at the very end of the site's alphabetical index of games), writing: "If there is one file you look at on this site, this should be it. We've saved the best for last, baby!"
"We used screenshots and joke captions, Whazzat was all just text," Teels says. "They made an exception for Zero Wing, though, as it was just such a perfect demonstration of what we love about awkward localizations. I bring that up because no one can really say whether or not Something Awful got the quote through my site, their site, or if Seymont/someone else posted it to the Something Awful forums as well — and it was Something Awful that really pushed the Zero Wing opening into ubiquity."
As with most truly viral memes, no one can pinpoint a single vector from which Zero Wing first entered the public eye. ZVGQ was among the earliest carriers — the oldest version of the site on archive.org (dated Dec. 1998) already features the game in its index — but along with ZVGQ and Whazzat!, the meme tracking site Know Your Meme states that the game began to circulate at the Rage Games forum around that time as well.
Also in keeping with the nature of memes, the frenzy over Zero Wing inspired plenty of unhappy feelings. As screenshots and GIFs began to expand outward to ever-growing social circles of the Internet and into mainstream news organization, a fair amount of acrimony about who deserved credit for the game's popularization took root. Likewise, those who claimed "insider" cachet of having already seen and laughed at the intro before it reached its next, larger permutation tended to respond to newcomers with a mixture of disdain and exhaustion. The game intro spread like wildfire across Something Awful's forums around the same time that game remix community Overclocked Remix featured a song that sampled the introductory dialogue, which led to internecine squabbling. When link aggregator Fark entered the picture, the whole thing became downright nasty: Members of each community accused the other sites of "stealing" the joke, and the meme's rampant profileration within the Something Awful forums soon led to its mention resulting in punitive bans.
Teel may not know exactly where the Zero Wing meme began, but he has no trouble pointing to its primary vector. "I think the remix and the Flash video put it over the top," he says. "Viral video before there was a word for it. I can't find the original Flash, but there's a YouTube video of it. Of course, that has Tatsuya Uemura's absolutely bangin' Zero Wing soundtrack to thank for getting it stuck in the head of early 21st century nerds everywhere."
As one of the people responsible for propagating the Zero Wing virus, Teel wasn't immune to the drama that resulted from its popularity. "At the time, my thoughts about it were pretty mixed," he admits. "If you go to ZVGQ now, I think I changed the description to, 'It's dead, Jim.' That may have had more to do with my emotional state and the time it was all happening, though... mixed-up teenager just coming out of high school and all that.
"It was kind of fun to see this thing I had a small part in explode into ubiquity, but running that site also meant I couldn't escape it. There was also the whole thing where I was trying to fit in with various 'older kid' cliques on the Internet at the time, and appearing disaffected by the whole thing seemed to be the way to endear myself to the group. My biggest 'regret' is not shamelessly capitalizing on it, but I also know I wouldn't have been capable of that back then."
Make your time
Today, the Zero Wing meme has subsided and faded away, having run its natural course. It's remembered, but rarely referenced, having secured a place for itself as one of those, "Hey, remember that thing...?" blips in history, like Tamagotchi and that gold and white (or was it blue and black?) dress. Still, even if its spread and subsequent overuse has left the phrase "All Your Base" a bloody, beaten horse corpse, years of distance have helped Teel to come around on the germ of accidental brilliance that appealed to him and so many others to begin with.
"What makes [the dialogue] so great is that it's sustained," he says. "It's not just a one-off line, it's a constant stream of amazing quotes... and it tells a complete, more-or-less coherent story. It's this exchange between this all-powerful villain 'Cats' and the doomed crew of a starship, and it's supposed to be this intense scene where we witness how powerless the good guys are against Cats, raising the stakes for you when you board the Zig fighter and take him on single-handedly.
"But the phrasing is so strange, and the grammar is mangled. Like the phrase, 'You have no chance to survive make your time'... it seems to be saying something like, 'You have no chance to survive, so enjoy what little time you have left' — something this sinister villain would say — but where does 'make your time' come from?
"Of course, everyone latched onto the one quote, 'All your base are belong to us.' It's a really simple error — remove the 'are' and make base plural, and it's more-or-less workable English — so it's not an unusual sort of mistake a less-experienced English speaker might make. The line is coherent. It makes sense; all of their bases have been overtaken by Cats' army.
"I think that line caught on in particular because the line has really great rhythm and consonance, and being this Dr. Doom style declamatory statement, it's fun to boldly march into a situation and announce that all of someone's base are belong to you. It's grammatically incorrect, but it sounds really good, so there's a humorous disconnect between how good the line sounds, and how it violates what you've been taught is correct English. And there's no irony or intentionality behind the line. It was a non-native speaker doing the best job they could with limited knowledge of the language, so it feels like it's this naturally occurring thing rather than someone butchering English intentionally as a joke or for artistic reasons or whatever."
While many of the sites that helped propel Zero Wing into the public eye have vanished into the ether of the Internet, ZVGQ remains up and running — though Teel no longer has any part in the site, and improved localization standards means there are fewer games worth highlighting these days.
"It's still around, though it's not updated terribly frequently," says Teel. "It's been through a few owners by now. There's a lot of me still left in the page and that's kind of embarrassing, since I'm a very different person in my thirties than I was in my teens. There's also some pride in seeing that something I started has lasted for nearly two decades, though.
"I worry that it seems a bit mean-spirited or even racist now, and nowadays when I giggle at some goofy translation work I don't want to seem like I'm ridiculing the translator for the imperfect localization. I just can't help but find how the style changes the intent fascinating and incredibly funny, in how it produces these novel structures, ironies and non-sequiturs in a way that a native speaker or writer of the language couldn't intentionally create."
As for Zero Wing itself? That is, the actual game — is it in fact any good beyond that gibbering intro? Absolutely, says Teel.
"I'm not a great judge of shooting games since I'm not all that good at them, but it's pretty good!" he enthuses. "Looks good, sounds great, has a neat little mechanic where you can grab enemies and use them as your shield or toss them at other enemies... The endings are certainly something, though."