Obituary

All Your Base came from a 1989 Japanese arcade game, Zero Wing, whose English localization was written by a man who had clearly never met the English language. 'Somebody set up us the bomb,' the villain said, and 'All your base are belong to us.' For a year in 2001, that last line was everywhere: on shirts, in the news, in the mouth of every person who had ever owned a computer. It was the internet's first truly global inside joke, born before social media, spread by email forwards and flash sites. It died when it became a trivia question, which is the fate of all pioneers.

Born

2001

Died

2002

Cause of death

Died of a mistranslation

Last sighting

A flash animation site, 2002

Resting place

Section Z, Row 2 — the ancestral plot

Category

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