The Hamster Dance
Elf Bowling
Mahir, the "I Kiss You" guy
Yes, the Internet has certainly provided a good number of crazy fads in its short life. To these, you can add the latest absurdity: All Your Base Are Belong To Us, which debuted this week at #46 on the Lycos 50.
What on earth does it mean? Well, it comes from the opening on-screen, printed dialogue from a 1989 video game called Zero Wing for the Sega Megadrive (the European version of the Genesis). The Japanese-to-English translation didn't really work out that well, so the enemy uses the grammatically lacking phrase, "All your base are belong to us." Here's the whole dialogue between the ship captain and the leader of the aliens, the CATS:
Captain: What happen?
Mechanic: Someone set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you!!
CATS: How are you gentlemen!!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say?
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha?
Well, that doesn't make sense, does it? According to the website GameFAQs, the original Japanese dialogue goes something like this:
CATS: You appear to be preoccupied, gentlemen (sarcasm)
CATS: Thanks to the cooperation of the UN forces, we've taken over all of your bases.
CATS: Your ship too shall soon be destroyed.
Captain: Impossible!
CATS: We thank you for your cooperation. (more sarcasm)
CATS: Enjoy the remaining moments of your lives?
That makes a lot more sense.
For some reason, web-savvy folks with a lot of time on their hands have begun producing pictures which show the phrase (and other, related Zero Wing phrases) appearing in the strangest locales -- a McDonald's sign, an airplane, and the center of Times Square. There is a version in which George W. Bush appears instead of the leader of CATS in order to state to the Iraqis, "All your no fly zone belong to us."
A number of websites have appeared to follow the trend. The website for the cancelled FOX program Freakylinks has been replaced with the phrase. All Your Base was offered for auction at eBay. There is even a music video, showing all these pictures set to a techno beat.
Even Lycos is not immune; the phrase appears in the windows of the seventh floor at Terra Lycos headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. And check out the results of this poll from our pals at htmlGEAR.
How did we get from a little-known game from a company that has been dead for six years to a phrase that's more popular than Limp Bizkit or The Beatles? According to this history, the phrase was first posted in an online video game forum in early 2000. The techno song was released on MP3 in November and the fake pictures began to appear in December.
Lycos first saw the phrase stirring the first week of 2001. That week, All Your Base was far, far down the list, as popular as composer Aaron Copeland or the Arizona Cardinals. That may seem like a lot of searches, but remember: the NFL regular season was over at this point, and we aren't sure the Cardinals are actually a professional football team anyway.
It went on like this until last week. Then, all of a sudden, someone set us up the bomb. Last week All Your Base received 68 times as many searches as the week before. Then this week, it tripled again to enter the Lycos 50. The phenomenon has also been covered in the past week by Time Magazine and columnist Jon Carroll from the San Francisco Chronicle (who has written about us as well).
What does the future hold for All Your Base Are Belong To Us? Well, the Hamster Dance made it as high as #32, and Elf Bowling peaked at #11. Maybe All Your Base can rise that high, or perhaps this is just a one-week fad. All we know is that the Zero Wing fans will not rest until all 'ZIG' are launched, and all base are returned.
TOMORROW: Two Mandys that came and gave without taking.
