An anniversary for great justice: Remembering “All Your Base” 20 years later | Hacker News Reader

An anniversary for great justice: Remembering “All Your Base” 20 years later

arstechnica.com

275 pointssamizdis116 comments

A clue as to the origins of the Zero Wing translation in this interview with Masahiro Yuge of Toaplan:

>-Toaplan also ported Zero Wing to the Megadrive. Who came up with the broken English “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US” from the overseas attract mode?

>Yuge: It may have been this guy who was in charge of our exports at the time. He was always having business meetings with people from overseas, and I went to a few of them myself, and his English was really terrible (laughs).

http://shmuplations.com/toaplan-yuge1/

And you can see the original All Your Base thread posted by Bad_CRC archived here on Tribal War (all image links are dead, though):

http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=2453...

I can remember when this was posted on Tribal War and the deluge of mediocre photoshops that it generated. Back then, your internet cred was measured in your photoshop ability. Good times.

There's a bittersweet nostalgia in finding any web-forum where you can see your own account with an ancient last-posted date.

As usual XKCD has this covered:

https://xkcd.com/2363/

They’re still arguing about SNES vs Genesis / Megadrive on rec.games.video.nintendo. Some threads seem to go back 20 years.

Except sadly the xkcd forums themselves were wiped from the internet.

Why did that happen?

The took them offline after a security breach, and they never came back. https://www.engadget.com/2019-09-03-xkcd-forum-breach-expose...

As have too many others. It fills me with the same sadness as deforestation.

Wow, from another era. I miss these random vBulletin forums, they were pretty ubiquitous back in the day. There were other 90s memes at the time, like dancing baby, hamster dance, etc. But this is definitely one of the earliest examples I can remember of this sort of emergent creative collaboration.

I wonder if kids these days appreciate how novel photoshop was at the time. That was at least part of the hilarity of the meme.

I recently started interacting with a vBulletin forum (https://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/). It’s just as bad as I remember from all those years ago. Bad layout, bad markup so that it’s difficult for me to make it nicer in user stylesheets (most notably, I want to make it more compact), a bad HTTP/HTTPS situation, unreasonably tight restrictions (e.g. “you can’t post links until you’ve posted 15 messages”), crazy pagination and thread organisation behaviour which prevents you from having meaningful persistent links (“?page=4” is hopeless when it depends on the user’s comments-per-page and linear-or-threaded settings), and other weird defaults (e.g. pretend threads from over a year ago don’t exist, unless you opt into seeing them; or showing only 10 comments per page by default, with the maximum being only 40), defaulting replies to a quote-everything style… it’s just not nice to deal with, even apart from using that old relic BBCode (thank goodness for the “preview” option, anyway—it’s essential). Unfortunately, all the alternatives I know of are irritating in their own ways too (e.g. Discourse is far too spacious, loads slowly, and has painful lazy loading).

Restrictions are not that unreasonable when you consider web forums are massive spam targets.

But I agree web forums were successful despite their implementations. There was (and arguably there still is) a primal thirst for communication among people, that will drive demand for social software likely forever.

My own observation from acting as a moderator in a couple of places over the years is that the first post of an account is almost always sufficient to tell whether an account is a spammer or not. I would say that a better approach would be to moderate users’ first posts—or perhaps to do spam analysis and moderate any that are not overwhelmingly ham. But even without that, requiring fifteen messages before allowing links is going well beyond what could be argued as helping with spam protection.

Haha, yeah, I'm not saying there shouldn't be better alternatives and that I miss vBulletin itself. I just miss the communities and how interesting they all were. Had high hopes for Discourse, it's unfortunate the performance isn't there.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010331112908/http://www.tribalw... seems to have a lot of the original images.

> and his English was really terrible (laughs).

I have been (and still am) an avid consumer of Japanese animation of the late 70s and 80s

This kind of things happened a lot back then, I have collected over the years screens of the translation errors I have encountered, mostly because they are gloriously fun

an example (from Uchū Senshi Barudiosu): https://i.postimg.cc/Kzn6GCWb/image.png

I remember the night I saw this for the first time. It was after a friend of mine had a “Roadhouse” themed party in his loft where he had a stage surrounded in chicken wire where people went inside to sing karaoke and we’d throw beer bottles at them. After we trashed the place, someone showed us this weird video on their laptop. We watched it over and over, convinced it was brilliant. It felt like a defining moment for my generation. God, I’m so old.

A Roadhouse party is a hilariously weird concept. Is this a thing people did at some point or do you just have really wonderful friends?

It's in the original 1980's Blues Brothers at least:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdR6MN2jKYs

Just a really crazy wonderful friend.

This is the best first AYB exposure possible.

I actually felt a little reassured it's only 20 years old. That's about when I heard about it, but by the time it reached me it felt ancient.

It was brilliant. I watched it again a few weeks ago though, testing out the Ruffle Flash player, and found most of it kind of boring.

The origin of most of the photoshopped images that made it into the animation was on a web bulletin board dedicated to this FPS game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starsiege:_Tribes

I remember seeing them all in their much higher resolution originals before the animation existed.

http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=2453...

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-your-base-are-belong-to-u...

As I recall (I was active on TribalWar then), the images in the original animation were taken from other sites (including SomethingAwful) by Bad_CRC, who made the animation and posted it on TribalWar. It then took off big time after that and people made a lot of new images.

My memory is hazy but that time period was definitely the golden era of somethingawful's photoshop contests, the tribalwar and somethingawful forums threads were occurring and having things added to them simultaneously...

Yeah it was SA

Man, Tribes was such a great video game. It still holds up, even, and I don't know of anything like it in the 25(?) years since.

I agree. I played that and tribes 2 so much. I haven found a game with such intense action with so many players as that since.

Hey, I used to do most of the coding for that site. I'm pretty sure Rayn is still running the place.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/11940

Newgrounds seems to have converted their popular Flash animations to MP4... time to re-watch Xiao Xiao :)

You can still watch the original swf through Ruffle.

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/11940/format/flash

Also the lesser-known Dr. Kleiner and Barney version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAj7RMIo-4w&feature=youtu.be...

Still a catchy song.

Agreed. As is "The Terrible Secret of Space," also by The Laziest Men on Mars. Even more delightfully absurd (IMO), but never achieved the meme status of AYB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_CoY0sBb1M

A huge chunk of what we now consider internet culture was derived from the Something Awful forums and some of the other sites that sprouted out of it (4chan). I believe most/all the images in the video the OP is derived from were from a "Photoshop Friday" content from Something Awful.

I remember the first time I saw what we'd now call "memes", but were then called "image macros" on some of these forums. (This is the most work friendly example I remember: http://bensbargains.net/thecheckout/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/discount-tent.jpg )

It's incredible to me that the form of media is been largely unchanged in almost two decades of accelerated cultural change. 20 years ago the big joke was photoshopping "All Your Base" into some photo. The biggest meme of 2020 was photoshopping Bernie Sanders into some photo. The biggest difference is that these things used to have a relatively burn as they worked their way through the culture and now they burn white hot for a few days and are immediately dated a week later.

Honestly the SA photoshop contests were different (and in many ways, more entertaining and impressive) than contemporary memes.

I feel the same, but I suspect it's old man nostalgia.

I was never on SA but am curious if you'd enjoy https://b3ta.com/ , they've run a weekly(?) Image Challenge since the early 2000s.

Currently 'boxes' https://b3ta.com/challenge/boxes/popular

Previous challenges: https://b3ta.com/challenge/

I only looked briefly but those jokes are way less funny than what I remember from SA. SA's photoshop contests today probably would get some posters doxxed by the New York Times for wrongthink.

There were fewer memes as well, so there was more of a sense of “netspeak” imho. Now each subculture has its own set of memes, and there are so many subcultures that it’s impossible to consider them all. I guess this is a natural evolution but it makes me a bit sad.

I think the "first internet meme" title should go to ASCII cows. https://cruzio.com/2019/10/ascii-cows/ (I don't know what would be a cannonical source for this - this is a first googled link)

I remember viewing them and thinking that the internet is really a crazy thing.

That link says 1989; I'd consider that pre-internet.

AFAIK the internet was growing fast already in the 1980´s in academia. E.g. RFC793 which defines TCP is dated september 1981.

Also, there was a network community before the internet. Cliff Stoll’s The cuckoo’s nest, describing events from 1986, mostly happens on tymnet. There’s a paragraph in there comparing tymnet with internet.

You might be right about the www. I remember receiving my first chernobyl cows by email. The link above has only ASCII cows, the chernobyl aspect came from embedding ANSI escape sequences in there to colorize or blink the cow. The first mail programs were not escape resistant, so the cows could leak into the gui and even mess with your keyboard.

It might have started in 1989 - but in 1993 when I encountered it it was still alive.

From my terminal, just now:

  ~$ cowsay "This meme hasn't died yet..."
   ______________________________
  < This meme hasn't died yet... >
   ------------------------------
          \   ^__^
           \  (oo)\_______
              (__)\       )\/\
                  ||----w |
                  ||     ||

Ahhhh Something Awful. I was more of a GenMay guy myself but both were such fun places to hang out in my high school and college years.

Wow! Gemany...I haven’t heard that in a long time. Still some of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life come from that forum.

SA is still a fun place to hang out. I've been a member there for 15 years now.

Agreed. I’ve been there almost 20 years now and still read the forums every day. It was weird to read this article and not even see SA called out as the original source. I think maybe a lot of old humor during SA’s heyday was like that.

"Zero wing Rhapsody" is worth watching too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE6emvdmg-M

If this is the subthread for AYB remixes: Steamed Hams but it's a meme from 2001:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG-kEchCKHo

Main screen turn on...

All your base are belong to Stingy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um0TLiWa8Dw

Live action version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aYaO93UiYQ

Almost 18 years later, this is still pretty funny: https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=56859&cid=5503...

Zero Wing Zero Hour is here at last.

https://xkcd.com/286/

And the hover caption correctly predicted that it will occur in AD 2021!

The xkdc guy used to write for the Simpsons' so it makes sense that he can also predict the future.

Randall Munro worked briefly for nasa during/after college but has been full time on xkcd since then (2006). He never worked for the Simpsons.

It’s really weird to see new urban legends being coined about stuff I know, like this one.

Randall Munroe never worked on the Simpsons, at least not the Randall Munroe who created XKCD.

He predicted the year correctly in 2007. Maybe he had a hand in steering this !

I'm on mobile, so can't do 'show source', but it's not simply a clever use of getYear()?

The caption has been unchanged since at least 2014. Corroboration: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/286:_All_Your_Bas... (external site, wiki edit log visible). While the comic has fun with the format, this is just a funny coincidence (after all, many things could be taken as "the resurgence" of all your base)

Has it really been 20 years? In the days before memes, this was basically a meme on Slashdot for years. I feel so old suddenly.

You must be new here

https://ziglang.org/ for great justice.

From the Zig tutorial[0]:

  file.writeAll("all your codebase are belong to us\n") catch unreachable;

[0] https://ziglang.org/learn/overview/

Now might be a good time to recall:

  AOL is sucks!!!what you can
    do with ther cd rom bisk:
  :cost to mutch
  :it suck
  :no good 
  :send to many disk.
  :Me and my friends took a 
     bisk and lit it on fire 
     and froze it
  :slamed it angaisnt the boor.

...adjudged by Richard Cretan "a marvel of compression and thwarted expiation".

<http://www.violently-happy.net/unprofessional/lib/txt/folklo...>

It is almost a miracle that Google was able to locate the text. Could this be the same RICHARD CRETAN, freelance writer in St. Paul, Minnesota reachable via rcretan@mac.com ?

I’m amazed at how much of early memes were like “hey look I photoshopped these words into a sign somewhere”, whereas now it’s just “here’s a funny picture that I drew words on”. I think the current way is better? Less skill to execute, but more variety in content.

This gives nostalgia vibes of the 4chan from 10-ish years ago.

Back then “memes” were fringe, but 9gag slowly took over with washed down normie memes.

A logic puzzle I made last year largely consisting of jokes about this:

https://eff30.cat/kitty-o-games/gentlemen/

We used a crossbow and fishing line to make it look like we climbed on a university building to hoist a AYBABTU banner. Took them the better part of three days to figure out how we did it.

FWIW: It's quite a nice game.

If you like retro games fire up an emulator and give it a try.

Is there a name for these old memes? Vintage memes? Antique memes?

Fads.

Not derogatory, this is what they were called at the time.

The term "meme" for such internet things started in the early 90's.

https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/

This is true, but colloquially they were known as fads. At least on YTMND, 4chan, SA, or any other major hub in the late 90s/early 00s

According to Wikipedia :

The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.[12]

Fads was a strictly YTMND term. On 4chan they were generally called memes, on SA they were image macros.

Dank memes, as in they are so old they have started to stink a bit (but also a backhanded compliment, like how 'badass' is actually pretty good)

While I think AYBABTU is dank, dank memes refers to modern day memes that are both ironic, bad and absurd; see https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dank-memes

Ancient memes? 90s? memes?

https://twitter.com/oldmemearchive

I believe the term of art is simply "old meme".

fond meme-ories.

classic memes

What happen?

Somebody set up us the bomb

Ah, the days when memes were actually funny

I remember "all your base" as a meme on Slashdot. They weren't particularly funny then, either.

More generally, memes are only funny to people who are immersed in them. You were probably more immersed in the memes then so they were funny to you. And less now so they are not. But nothing fundamental has changed. Memes by their nature tend to be based on inside jokes that are only funny to the people on the inside.

I don't know if I've ever been immersed in 'memes', in fact I don't think you really could be immersed in them around the turn of the century. They were just amusing gifs being passed back and forth, that seemed to be especially good at catching peoples' eyes.

Think dancing baby, zombo.com, cheezburger cat... they were funny, we passed em on, that was that. I do remember saving the ones I liked in a 'funny pics' folder -- which I still have -- but I'm not sure there were very many people 'immersed' in them any more than any other fringe part of internet nerd culture.

That said, AYB was probably the first meme I ever 'immersed' in, in that it was the right combination of weird and zany and that it fit my zeitgeist back in the day.

But then icanhazcheezburger.com and KnowYourMeme came around, and that their efforts to collect and categorize probably marked the beginning of the end.

Other memes i remember from /. are:

In soviet russia SUSTANTIVE VERBs YOU!

In north korea email is for old people

Slashdot was ripe with memes. One of the more sinister ones was posting a comment link to something mundane looking, but it was actually a link to a .cx shock site containing "goat" in the domain name. Later it evolved into Rick Rolling, but the goat thing predated that by long.

I think the prank / meme became so widespread that at some point they changed the site code to spell out the linked domain name in text after the <a>.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those..

With hot grits

The goatse meme lived on until 2012 when the bbc broadcast an Olympic logo suggestion based on it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YXyTn3-bluk

And instead we got one that's been described as "Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob". I'm not sure we did better.

I fell for that one so many times that I became completely desensitized to the picture.

I, for one, welcome the revival of old internet culture.

1. revive old internet culture

2. ...

3. profit!

Hey, Cowboydang jokes are off ulimit!

> In soviet russia SUSTANTIVE VERBs YOU!

This joke form is apparently as old as 1938: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Soviet_Russia

Don't forget "pour hot grits down my pants", "Natalie Portman, naked and petrified" and of course GNAA.

Also, BSD is Dying:Netcraft confirms it.

I used this two days ago just on HN

I used it a couple weeks back. A Hackernews tried to tell us Emacs was dying, so I asked him if Netcraft confirmed it.

My favorite Soviet Russia joke was 'in Soviet Russia, television watch you' but somewhere along the way capitalists decided this was a brilliant idea ¯\(°_o)/¯

Without commenting on what OP meant I would say memes definitely used to be more quirky and funny and lighthearted in general. Heck, originally calling them memes was because they stuck around and passed between people despite often being nonsensical. They tend to be more opinionated nowadays, and popular ones are usually topical, political, snarky, or all of the above. Not a random mistranslation of an old video game.

I don't know why this comment was downvoted into oblivion as you hit the nail on the head. If there is one thing I can think of that separates memeing 20 years ago from memeing today its that todays memes are far more expressive -- as if they are used as a substitute for conversation or discourse -- than funny. It seems they are overwhelmingly trying to express emotions than be lighthearted or funny.

I'm part of several gaming subreddits that hold an overly hostile view of the game's developers, and the number of memes used to stab or jab at said devs outnumbers old-school "funny" memes or even the more contemporary "shared experience" memes practically two-to-one.

Plus, there are all these unwritten social rules about meme templates, and indeed they seem to have their own economy of sorts.

Take everything together and it seems that memes are serious business, which is stupid if you ask me. Memes are supposed to be funny and lighthearted!

image macros have been around for 20 years as well

"Supposed to be" funny, sure, but this is drifting towards "funny sad" or just anger.

I think with all the frustration out there, urban red-state Millennials like myself are stuck expressing themselves in meme form since our congressional representatives (Missouri) appear to be chasing rural voters who think Biden is a scary socialist. One of these days I'll find time to grab a stamp and mail off a few memes on paper to my congressperson, since they don't seem to be reading my emails to them or listening to the voicemails I send them.

To wit: "If the money to feed, clothe, and house the homeless has to come from taxing Jeff Bezos... I'm not going to lose any sleep over that."

Just be careful their meaning isn't lost as I doubt your congresscritter is part of the in-group that would actually get them

I absolutely love the variation and thought that goes into many a meme these days.

Bad memes are awful (Sturgeons law), but a good meme is cheap fun that I can consume in a second

Sure there's lots of variation but they seem to be little more than people trying to passive-aggressively express some agenda or frustration, most of the time.

idk, when memes became mainstream (I'm thinking mainly of the heaps and heaps of impact font advice animals and rage comics) they weren't funny. I prefer the absurd ones nowadays, the endless rapid fire clip shows on youtube, etc.

Yes when we were 15 years old

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

> The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. ...

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