It all began as a small mockery on a few gaming websites. Zero Wing was never a popular game by any stretch (Toaplan went out of business shortly after its release) but a few gaming reporters and fans began to quote from the various crappy translations with Engrish gold such as "You have no chance to survive, make your time," "Somebody set up us the bomb," and of course "All your base are belong to us" spoken by the game's villain known only as Cats. Soon enough message boards and websites began filling up with various images featuring All Your Base-related quotes, some fake, some impressingly real. Early in 2001 as everyone was trying to one-up everyone else with their latest submissions Jeffrey Ray Roberts (AKA Bad_CRC), a computer programmer from Kansas City, had sampled the "All your base" quote in a techno dance track and made a short slide-show flash video featuring screenshots from the game and the best of the photo submissions.

What started out as a simple mockery catapulted into a Lycos Top 50 search almost instantly upon the release of Robert's video who made the short flash simply for "the sheer inside-joke value of it." The phenomenon could not be ignored (especially since that ass-munching, but insanely popular Hampster Dance only made it as high as #32 on the Lycos Top 50.) All Your Base has been featued in news stories in Time magaine, USA Today and Fox News, although the jury is still out on whether or not Fox News can legitimatly qualify as 'news'. Nonetheless, All Your Base will go down in web history as one of the first major internet crazes sparking the creation of vast amounts of merchandise, an actual term for humorous Japanese to English translations, and a series of fan sites. But this article hails the original All Your Base website that hosted the video: