All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Gaming's Greatest Mistranslation, Rerun in 2026

Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Google, a small Japanese studio shipped a mediocre space shooter to Europe with an opening cutscene translated by someone who had clearly never met the English language socially. A decade later, that cutscene conquered the internet. "All your base are belong to us" became one of the first true memes — photoshopped onto billboards, sung over techno beats, quoted in actual newspapers by actual adults.

Everyone knows the meme. Almost nobody asks the two questions we exist to answer: what was that script actually trying to say — and what happens if you translate it today? So we took Zero Wing's original Japanese lines and ran them through modern machine translation via Translation Mixer, then fed the meme itself through a five-language chain to see what the machines make of our broken English. The results are genuinely poignant. Also one of them turned the meme into gardening.

How a Space Shooter Conquered the Internet

Zero Wing was a 1989 arcade shoot-'em-up from Toaplan, a Japanese studio beloved by genre fans and unknown to everyone else. The arcade version had no story to speak of. When the game was ported to the Sega Mega Drive in 1991, an opening cutscene was added: the evil cyborg CATS boards your ship, gloats, and you launch your fighter to take revenge. The European cartridge shipped with that cutscene translated into… something:

In A.D. 2101, war was beginning.
"What happen ?" "Somebody set up us the bomb."
"We get signal." "Main screen turn on."
"It's you !!" "How are you gentlemen !!"
"All your base are belong to us."
"You are on the way to destruction."
"You have no chance to survive make your time."
"Take off every 'ZIG' !!" "For great justice."

The game sank without a trace. The screenshots didn't. They circulated on late-90s forums, and in early 2001 a Flash video — the meme's Trojan horse, set to a pounding techno track — put "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" on photoshopped street signs, cereal boxes, and the Hollywood sign. Wired and Time covered it. A meme was born before most people knew the word "meme."

What the Script Was Actually Trying to Say

Here's the part nobody does: the original Japanese lines, next to what the 1992 cartridge said, next to what modern machine translation says today — every modern rendering below is real, unedited output from our mixer:

A perfect sweep. Every line the 1992 translator mangled, the 2026 machine renders cleanly — and look at what was buried under the Engrish all along. (Engrish, if the term is new to you, is the internet's affectionate name for mangled Japanese-to-English — and the word is its own first exhibit: Japanese has a single sound sitting between r and l, so English speakers hearing "Engrish" were laughing at exactly the kind of gap this whole post is about.) "You have no chance to survive make your time" was supposed to be "Cherish the little time you have left" — CATS wasn't spouting gibberish, he was delivering an elegant villain's taunt. And "For great justice," beloved second-tier meme, turns out to be a rewrite, not a translation: the captain's actual line is the melancholy "Hope for our future…" The most quotable phrase in the game barely existed in the original.

Why It Happened (It's the Same Reason It's Always Been)

Zero Wing's translation wasn't lazy — it was structurally doomed, for reasons regular readers will recognize from our hardest-languages testing:

• Japanese doesn't mark plurals. 基地 is "base" or "bases"; the sentence doesn't say. The translator had to choose, chose wrong, and "all your base" was born from a grammatical feature, not a typo.
• Japanese drops subjects and objects constantly. "Somebody set up us the bomb" is what happens when you reassemble a subject-free sentence with the parts in the wrong order.
• Politeness registers don't map. いただいた is humble-honorific — CATS is being sarcastically polite, like a supervillain saying "we'll be taking those, thank you." No 1992 cartridge had room for that nuance.
• There was no localization industry yet. Translation was often done in-house at tiny studios, by whoever knew the most English, under cartridge memory limits measured in kilobytes. Nobody imagined anyone would read these screens twice, let alone thirty-five years later.

The Rest of the Pantheon (Sorted by Honesty)

"All your base" headlines a whole museum wing, but the labels matter — some classics aren't what they seem:

Genuine mistranslations: "A winner is you" (Pro Wrestling, NES 1987) and Metal Gear's "I feel asleep!!" and "The truck have started to move!" (NES 1988) are Zero Wing's true siblings — same era, same grammar traps. "This guy are sick" (Final Fantasy VII, 1997) proved that even a flagship release with a real budget could still faceplant on subject–verb agreement.

Beloved and (mostly) intentional: "You spoony bard!" (Final Fantasy IV, 1991) gets cited as a translation fail, but "spoony" is a real, if Victorian, English word meaning foolishly sentimental. We ran the original insult — おのれ！この、うたうたいー！ — through the mixer and got the flavorless "Damn you! You singer!" Suddenly "you spoony bard" looks less like an error and more like inspired localization; Square has kept it in every remake since, and they're right to.

Not a mistranslation at all: "I am Error" (Zelda II, 1987) is the most slandered line in gaming. The character is literally named Error (エラー) — he's paired with a character named Bagu (バグ, "bug"). It's a programmer in-joke that the whole internet mistook for a mistake. The translation is fine. Justice for Error.

Never translated to begin with: "Congraturation. This story is happy end." (Ghosts 'n Goblins) and "Conglaturation !!!" (Ghostbusters, NES) weren't translated badly — they were written directly in English by Japanese developers without a translator in the building. Engrish, artisanal and unfiltered.

Then We Fed the Meme Back Into the Machine

Modern MT fixing the old lines is satisfying, but this is Translation Mixer — so we also ran the broken English itself through a five-language chain (Japanese → Hmong → Amharic → Kyrgyz → Welsh) to see what the machines do with our sacred gibberish:

"All your base are belong to us."
→ "All your roots are ours."

The failure trail is beautiful: Japanese repaired the grammar first (modern MT can't help itself), but Hmong translated "base" as hauv paus — which also means root — and Amharic, Kyrgyz, and Welsh all faithfully passed the botany along. Thirty-five years of meme history, and the machine turned a military ultimatum into a hostile takeover of your garden. Somewhere, CATS is delighted.

And the taunt?

"You have no chance to survive make your time."
→ "You don't have time to live. Try to buy some time for yourself."

The mixer took the most famous broken threat in gaming and returned unsolicited life coaching. Honestly, it's not wrong.

Run Your Own Invasion

The meme chain is loaded — one click sends "All your base are belong to us" (or your own favorite gaming quote) through the exact path that produced the gardening incident:

→ All your base, through Japanese, Hmong, Amharic, Kyrgyz, and Welsh

Move ZIG. For great justice.

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Related: Translation Telephone: 25 Sentences That Fell Apart Spectacularly is the modern wreckage archive. And Why Machine Translation Humor Works explains why "somebody set up us the bomb" is funnier than any correct translation could ever be.