The internet's most famous translation error just turned 25

The Flash animation that turned a botched Sega Mega Drive localization into the internet's first global inside joke has turned 25 years old. On February 16, 2001, Newgrounds user Bad_CRC uploaded a music video set to a remix of the 1989 shooter Zero Wing, cementing "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" as the foundational text of internet meme culture.

While the phrase had circulated on forums like TribalWar throughout late 2000, it was this specific video, pairing the cutscene with the techno track "Invasion of the Gabber Robots", that pushed it into the mainstream. The anniversary marks a quarter-century since a niche retrogaming curiosity became a phenomenon that confused local law enforcement and appeared on national news tickers.

The remix that defined an era

The video's audio track was created by Jeffrey Ray Roberts, a Kansas City programmer and DJ who performed under the name The Laziest Men on Mars. Roberts released "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" in November 2000, sampling the game's soundtrack and layering the synthesized voiceover on top. The track became inseparable from the visuals, creating a multimedia package that was easy to share in an era before YouTube existed.

Roberts passed away in 2011 at the age of 34. His contribution turned a static screenshot into an earworm that dominated early 2000s culture. The video has since accumulated nearly 3 million views on Newgrounds, a number that would be significantly higher if modern tracking existed in 2001. The original Flash version is available on archive.org. Watch it. Love it.

With AI and the rest of the modern creator toolchain in 2026, it’s easy to forget what an achievement this video really was: a torrent of hand-made Photoshop edits, cut rapid-fire and often right on the beat, all stitched together in Flash. There’s a good chance I was messing around in the same kind of pirated copy of Photoshop 3 that Roberts probably used back then.

Localization that's so bad it's good.

The source of the meme is the European Mega Drive port of Zero Wing, a horizontal shooter developed by Toaplan. The game originally launched in Japanese arcades in 1989 without the infamous dialogue. When Toaplan ported the game to the Sega Mega Drive in 1991, they needed an English translation for the European market. Williams Electronics held the arcade rights in North America, preventing a US Genesis release, so the English script was produced solely for Europe.

According to Toaplan programmer Tatsuya Uemura, the translation duties fell to a member of the design team in charge of exports rather than a professional translator. Uemura later described this employee's English skills as "really terrible." The result was a script that ignored basic grammar in favor of direct, word-for-word substitution.

The original Japanese line spoken by the villain CATS was "Kimitachi no kichi wa subete CATS ga itadaita" (君達の基地は、全てCATSがいただいた). A proper translation would be "All of your bases have been taken over by CATS." Instead, players got the grammatically baffled "All your base are belong to us."

From forums to federal alerts

The speed at which the meme traveled in early 2001 was unprecedented for the dial-up era. Within days of the Newgrounds upload, the phrase appeared in Wired, The Guardian, and Time magazine. It jumped from screen to reality almost immediately. In 2003, residents of Sturgis, Michigan, placed signs bearing the phrase around their town as an April Fools' joke. Local police, unfamiliar with internet culture and on high alert during the Iraq War, described the signs as a "borderline terrorist threat."

The phrase eventually found its way into official channels. Nintendo referenced it in the E3 2016 demo for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted it in 2019 regarding tax policy. It remains a rare example of a meme that transcended its niche without relying on shock value or vulgarity.

Toaplan itself never saw the phenomenon. The studio filed for bankruptcy in 1994, seven years before their work became the most recognizable text in gaming history. The rights to Zero Wing are now held by Tatsujin, a company formed by Toaplan veteran Masahiro Yuge, ensuring the game (and its translation) remains available on modern platforms.