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zero wing screenshot from all your base are belong to us memeBefore Keyboard Cat, before Rickrolling -- heck, even before YouTube, if you can imagine a time that long ago -- there was All Your Base Are Belong to Us. All Your Base turns 10 this week, so here's a look back at the little flash movie that took over the internet in 2001. If you're already sick of it, you're about to feel old, and if you've never seen it before, you're in for a real treat.

All Your Base started with a mistranslated Japanese video game called Zero Wing that became a meme on internet forums, and then blossomed into a bizarre techno remix and accompanying flash animation. The combination of a catchphrase photoshopped into random images, the techno music and the funny "Engrish" dialogue made it a huge hit amongst the gamers of the day, and it quickly hit the mainstream.

How big was All Your Base? A Wired article from February 2001 reported that All Your Base was "spreading like grass fire across the cyber-plain" and expressed amazement that "[a]rmies of marketers toiling for years can't figure out how to grab Web-users' attention, and then a flash file with screen-shots from an outdated arcade game accompanied by clumsy subtitles conquers the world!"

It's also one of the rare internet memes to have its own Wikipedia article.