What Is All Your Base Are Belong To Us (AYBABTU)?

Ah, the Internet. A place where you can share your thoughts and be heard by people who care, and also a place where you can get lost in a strange world of distorted translations, video games, and T-shirts. The catchphrase "all your base belong to us" (AYBABTU) is a mangled translation of a Japanese phrase that appeared in the video game "Zero Wing" (1991) by Toaplan. The phrase became an Internet sensation in early 2000, appearing on T-shirts, in Photoshopped images and real-world locations. Although it's still being determined exactly how it started, people likely saw the phrase online and needed clarification on what it meant. As many people couldn't read Japanese at the time, they thought it was an English translation of some military communication but instead got something much more confusing "All your base belong to us". The phrase quickly became popular on sites like 4chan, which originated as an online forum for anime fans but has since become infamous for its often racist and misogynist content. It also appeared in Urban Dictionary as early as 2003, defined as "a statement made when one wins an argument". In the early 1990s, a video game called "Zero Wing" was released in Japan. It could have been a better video game with better graphics and better gameplay. But it became famous for one thing: its terrible translation job. It seems that in the game's original Japanese version, it said, "All your base belongs to us". It's still being determined what the original meaning of that phrase was meant to be. Still, it inspired a creative online community known as Somethingawful.com to take it in a different direction entirely. The people at Somethingawful took the phrase and turned it into an Internet meme that spread virally through email and images worldwide.