Feeling a Little Unhip These Days - Try out a little
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us"
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us"
June 5th, 2001
Lindsay Fraser
Introduction
Today I am treading into the waters of my esteemed colleague Alan Neal by discussing an Internet trend, phenomenon, whatever you want to call it, called "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" also referred to as "AYB".
Unlike Alan Neal, who I understand is very cool, I am finding myself extremely uncool these days. Is it age, is it my job, is it the very nature of motherhood that affects my coolness factor? I don't know.
All I do know is that I sound, look, feel and am, very uncool. To paraphrase that colourful wordsmith, Zaphod Beeblebrox of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "I'm so unhip, it's a wonder my bum doesn't fall off."
Perhaps because of this lack in myself, when I recently came across an obscure reference to a funky and seemingly cool Internet fad, I was immediately intrigued. In an effort to demonstrate the coolness I have found through knowing about something that you, dear listeners, may not yet be aware of, I have decided to devote this program to sharing with you this fad so that you too may go to your colleagues, partners and children and demonstrate your "hipness" or is that "hippidity"?.
Background
Perhaps you have heard someone utter the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong To Us"? Perhaps you have seen a T-shirt emblazoned with this bizarre and syntactically incorrect phrase? Perhaps you have received in your email, or seen on a Web site, a photograph of something ordinary like a highway sign or an airplane carrying the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong To Us"? If you have then you are not alone. Proliferating throughout the Internet are hundreds of cleverly adjusted photographs carrying this phrase. In fact you can now buy "AYB" t-shirts, canvas bags and mugs and you may even find your favourite manufacturer or retailer using the phrase but what, pray tell, does it mean?
Everyone has their personal interpretation of the nonsensical line but the general consensus is that it is an in-your-face way of saying "I own you. I've just beaten the pants off you." Another possibility is "I'm not really sure what I am talking about, but I sound hip" and my personal favourite "you are a total lamer for not understanding what I'm saying, although I'm not sure what I just said either".
Well, as the story goes, in 1989 (yes, 89), a now-defunct Japanese company called Toaplan released a video game called "Zero Wing" intended for the coin-operated arcade market. This, by all accounts, eminently forgettable game was later sold in Europe for Sega console machines. As is the case with many video games, the creators attempted to make up for the lackluster appearance of the interactive game proper by creating a sexy multimedia introduction that brings the player into the gaming environment. When the game was shipped overseas the manufacturer could not afford to professionally translate the introduction so the game, in English at least, featured that very special sort of English that the Japanese have long been known for (just think about the instruction manuals for Japanese products that you have had to decode before installing or building the product). With no professional translator, Zero Wing's Japanese-English shift turned the multimedia introduction into a grammatically challenged series of animated silliness. While the villain Cats snarls in Japanese "Thanks to the co-operation of the U.N. Forces, we've taken over all of your bases" the enemy's threats in English are reduced to a mere "All your base are belong to us".
Years later, some sources claim 1998, the first "all your base" sighting was made on the Internet. In no time the phrase began to spread both online and off. Apparently gamers starting "shouting" it (typing it all in caps) while playing online group computer games while others started adding it to their email signature files. Fans of "Zero Wing" began talking about it on electronic bulletin boards, the more rabid among them began posting digital photos that they had modified by inserting the "all your base" phrase in random spots.
The images proliferated - Budweiser-girl ads, airline fuselages, mug shots of Bill Gates, O.J. Simpson, commemorative plaques, Surgeon General's cigarette package warnings and fortune cookie fortunes - All digitally emblazoned with vaguely sinister slogans from "Zero Wing". Soon photos were appearing all over the Internet, and in email boxes, making it look like the whole world - from street signs, to advertising, to presidential billboards for George W. Bush - was in on the fad.
By early 2001 the "in-joke" had made it into the mainstream. An animated slideshow, featuring the game intro, was made available at the official fan site . Then Kansas City computer programmer and part-time deejay, Jeffrey Ray Roberts, sampled the quote and layered it over a dance track. According to Roberts he did it for the inside joke value and as a bit of one-up-man-ship. Roberts was soon one-upped by a member of the TribalWar game site who created a two minute music video pairing the techno tune with a healthy selection of the altered photos. Instead of using a regular bandwidth sucking video format the file was created as a slide show (in .swf format) and could be loaded in seconds. At the end of this May (we have heard) much of the spreading of the word was being done by dotcom workers in Silicon Valley.
How mainstream has it become, this underground joke? In the last few months the message has begun appearing on T-shirts and posters, tucked alongside the ads for the upcoming "Tomb Raider" movie and hidden inside new video games. The "all you base" line is well into its proverbial 15 minutes, as conservative and stodgy companies such as KMART and Hewlett-Packard are picking up on the trend. HP has been using images from the video game in advertising. KMART, until last week on its Bluelight.com Web site, allows for the user to search for "all your base are belong to us" and then presents to the user the full-blown multimedia file. You might wonder what purpose serving up that file serves. While KMART is not selling the file, the original video game or even "AYB" promotional material, it is making an attempt to be cool, hip and geeky. What KMART has done that is interesting is that it has customized its recommendation engine which normally says "if you like this, you might like these even more" to say "Other geeks that know about 'all your base are belong to us' also bought:". Needless to say the "other geeks" bought pretty predictable stuff - video games, digital cameras and MP3 players.
While KMART was making the file available last week it is no longer doing so - though if you search on "all your base are belong to us" you do get the recommendation engine's response instead of a simple "sorry, no results found". Why they have pulled the file is up for speculation. Were too many people hitting the site for that file alone? Was it slowing down their service? Or, and this is my suspicion, has someone been on to KMART and asked what right they have to publish the file?
One wonders how many mainstream companies have attempted to track down the creators of "AYB" to licence the slogan for commercial use? As marketers know, this sort of phenomenon (referred to as a meme "a unit of cultural information, such as a culture, practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.") cannot be intentionally manufactured. A great example is last year's Wazzzup commercials for Budweiser beer. Apparently the marketing types behind the promotion thought they were launching "true, true" as the Budweiser catchphrase/slogan. They, in fact, had no idea what they had until it took off. A meme, it seems, truly does evade manufacture.
Internet memes are of course, not new. Many who have received the file and examined the phenomenon have found it to be not unlike the dancing baby video that was passed around the Internet for months on end before it truly hit the mainstream when it was used on television's Ally McBeal. Another example was the ridiculous "I Kiss You!" home page of a Turkish journalist. The question is, whether anyone can take that freely distributed file and idea and truly make it work for themselves in a commercial, big-business context?
Conclusion
So here I am at the end of my exploration of the "AYB" phenomenon. While very interesting from a cultural perspective, and while I will be on guard for veiled references to it in advertising, I am sad to report that knowing about it hasn't made me cool.
In fact, my digging around has revealed that in sharing the "in-joke" with a broad audience at such a late date in its existence, I am probably about as uncool as I can be. This particular meme has slipped in and out of popularity multiple times in the last year. When the popularity has dropped, another magazine article makes reference to "AYB", the uninitiated find out about it and send on to all their friends and relatives the story of "Zero Wing" at which point the popularity of the meme peaks again. According to some Internet histories of "All Your Base" the phenomenon is pronounced dead several times every day, yet its 15 minutes of fame continue for some reason. Sooner or later though there will be a line in a major network sitcom, at which the mass audience will be expected to chuckle knowlingly, and perhaps then the "hip, counter-culture, in-joke" will be put to rest.
Lindsay Fraser is a Senior e-Solutions Strategist for Burntsand Inc. and all your base are belong to her. She can be reached at lfraser@burntsand.com or by telephone at 613-940-2172.
2013 - Lindsay Fraser is the Naked IM Professional and can be reached through this blog.
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