“All your base are belong to us” is a quote from the opening cutscene of a 1992 game called Zero Wing, which became a meme in the early 2000s. All Your Base Are Belong to Us is a video collection of those memes set to a techno remix of the Zero Wing soundtrack. That video is now 20 years old, and while I could spend the next few paragraphs lamenting my own age, and perhaps crumbling to dust, I want to instead talk about old memes.
The All Your Base video hit Newgrounds on February 16, 2001. The ‘meme’ is basically a collection of images with the titular phrase Photoshopped in, so you’d see “all your base” added to things like pictures of contemporary politicians, ads, or OJ Simpson’s mugshot. (Look, we had memes, but we didn’t have standards back in the early 2000s.)
This sort of thing would go on for months – years, in the case of something like All Your Base – and most of the ‘jokes’ were just repeating the phrase over and over and over again. Just think of the most annoying Monty Python fan you’ve ever known, and you’ve got the idea. Wait, are annoying Monty Python fans still a thing? Did that fall out of vogue, too?
These days, even Distracted Boyfriend feels like a relic of a bygone age, despite not being that long ago. Heck, Sure Grandma, Let’s Get You to Bed already feels done now, and that was basically last week!
Anyway, you can read about the actual All Your Base history on Wikipedia. Or just watch the video above. Or maybe play some old games. You know Runescape also just turned 20?