All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The Zero Wing Typo That Built Meme Culture

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In April 2003, signs reading "You have no chance to survive make your time" appeared around Sturgis, Michigan, just as the United States entered the war with Iraq. Police chief Eugene Alley warned of a possible borderline terrorist threat. It was an April Fools prank quoting Zero Wing, a 1989 Toaplan arcade shooter whose July 1991 Sega Mega Drive port for Europe gained an intro cutscene translated by a member of the export department with notoriously poor English. The villain CATS announces the theft of your bases, and the grammar collapses.

This episode follows the line from forgotten cartridge to global in-joke. Emulators and message boards revived it in 1999 and 2000, Kansas City programmer Jeffrey Ray Roberts set it to gabber techno as The Laziest Men on Mars, and on February 16th, 2001 a Flash video on Newgrounds sent it everywhere. Because the joke was absurd rather than vulgar, it reached coworkers, grandparents, Time, Wired, and USA Today, and it kept resurfacing for two decades.

Developers Tatsuya Uemura and Masahiro Yuge later confirmed there was no localization team, only an office worker mapping Japanese word order onto English.
Flash's small vector files let the Newgrounds video spread in 2001 when most people were still on dial-up modems.
In February 2004, North Carolina State University students slipped the phrase onto the News 14 Carolina closings ticker.
On June 1st, 2006, YouTube's maintenance page read All your video are belong to us, and users assumed the site had been hacked.
Fans decoding the Sheikah script in the 2016 E3 demo of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild found the phrase hidden in the game.

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