All Your Base Are Belong To Us Meme

What does "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" mean?

All your base are belong to us is deliberately ungrammatical English meaning "all of your bases now belong to us" — a total-takeover taunt. The joke is the grammar itself: the sentence is quoted ironically as an over-the-top way to announce that someone has been completely outplayed or outmaneuvered.

Origin

• 1991: Toaplan's Japanese arcade game Zero Wing opens with the line in its intro cutscene.
• 1992: The Sega Mega Drive port released in Europe ships with a rushed English translation, producing the now-famous sentence.
• Early 2001: Flash animations and remakes built around the line spread across Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep, turning it into one of the web's first widely shared image/animation memes.
• 2003: Whole sites built on the phrase on YTMND kept it alive and made it a fixture of early internet culture.

Examples

• Declaring victory after a comeback: "All your base are belong to us."
• Captioning a corporate takeover or a rival getting swept.
• Replying to a genuine threat with mock gravity to defuse it.

Translation

• Literal reading: a newcomer sees confused, broken English about owning bases.
• Actual meaning: "we control everything now" — total victory, stated absurdly.
• Cross-language note: most languages borrow the English line as-is, because translating the broken English would remove the joke.

FAQ

What does "All your base are belong to us" mean?

It means every base now belongs to us — total takeover — delivered as a playful, over-the-top declaration of victory.

Where does the phrase come from?

The intro cutscene of the arcade game Zero Wing (1991); the mistranslated version shipped with the 1992 European Mega Drive release.

When did it become a meme?

Early 2001, through Flash animations on Newgrounds and similar sites, with a second wave on YTMND in 2003.