hiring the intern to translate video games: a cautionary tale

In 1989 a Japanese company made a space shooting arcade game called Zero Wing. When they released it in Europe in 1991 they needed the opening scene translated to English. Instead of hiring a professional translator they gave the job to someone on the design team. The result was one of the most famous lines in internet history. The villain appears on screen and announces “All your base are belong to us.” The rest of the dialogue was just as broken. “Somebody set up us the bomb.” “You have no chance to survive make your time.” Nobody cared about the game itself but by 2000 the intro scene was being shared across every forum on the internet. Someone made a techno remix, someone else turned it into a flash video, and it spread everywhere. In 2003 a group in Michigan put signs reading “All your base are belong to us” all over their town as an April Fools joke and police called it a potential terrorist threat because nobody in town had any idea what it meant. It’s considered one of the first true internet memes.