From roughly 2000 to 2002, one of the most pernicious (or amusing) of Internet memes began spreading. The phrase "All your base are belong to us" is taken from the dialog of a1991 Japanese video for the Sega Mega Drive. The game was called Zero Wing. The phrase occurs in the opening scene (a cut-scene in gamer parlance) that was part of the splash presentation of the game. The original Japanese of version of the game from Toaplan was extraordinarily poorly translated by Sega of Europe. It was so appallingly awful a translation that it's inadvertently funny. In late 1998 an animated gif started appearing, first on Overclocked, but then everywhere, with the bad dialog essentially being celebrated. The Something Awful message forums seem to have spawned the meme, serving much the same function "back then" as 4Chan does now in terms of creating, popularizing, and spreading memes.

People started replacing text, everywhere, of all sorts, with the line "All your base are belong to us, " and various other catch phrases from the game. Sometime in late 2000 a computer programmer and a DJ in Kansas City named Jeffrey Ray Roberts made a techno dance track, "Invasion of the Gabber Robots", which remixed some of the Zero Wing video game music by Tatsuya Uemura with a voiceover phrase "All your base are belong to us. Someone else used that for a sound track with images from the original game and edited stills from a variety of sources. You can see the resulting Flash animation, with a selection of carefully edited still images, above.

There were a number of pranks between 200 and 2002, involving the phrase "All your base are belong to us," or the acronym AYBABTU. The meme entered permanent urban lore, so that by June 1, 2006 when YouTube was briefly taken offline for upgrades, the engineers posted a temporary Web page that read "All your video are belong to us." It was meant as a humorous subculture allusion; some users didn't get it.

On September 4, 2009, Google's logo was briefly changed to the one in the image above showing a UFO beaming up the second 'o' in 'Google'. On the same day, Google's twitter page posted the message, "1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19." with a link to the altered logo. The tweet uses a simple substitution code for letters for letters of the English alphabet; 1 = A; 12 = L, etc, which resolves to ALL YOUR O ARE BELONG TO US. It was an homage to Zero Wing's 20th anniversary.