ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, a terrible translation from a forgotten video game became the funniest sentence on the internet.

That's the whole history of memes, honestly. Something small and weird escapes its original context, a bunch of strangers decide it's theirs now, and suddenly it's everywhere. Nobody planned it. Nobody could have.

I've been online for all of it, from dial-up to TikTok, and memes are still one of my favorite ways to explain how the internet actually works. So here's my short, totally biased history, told through four of my all-timers.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us (2000–2001)

Zero Wing was a 1989 arcade shooter that got ported to the Sega Mega Drive a few years later. The intro was translated from Japanese into English so badly that it became art. It opens with an explosion on a ship, and the crew reacts:

Captain: What happen?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.

Then a villain named CATS shows up and announces that "all your base are belong to us." Somebody else replies, "You have no chance to survive make your time."

Gamers passed around GIFs of the intro in the late '90s. Then, in the winter of 2000, forums like TribalWar and Something Awful turned it into a Photoshop contest. People hid the phrase on street signs, storefronts and billboards. In February 2001, a user named Bad_CRC released a Flash music video set to a techno remix, and that was it. Wired wrote about it. The mainstream news tried to explain it and failed. College students hacked a local TV broadcast in 2004 to put it on screen. In 2006, YouTube's own engineers put up a placeholder that said "ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US."

This was the internet when it still felt like a secret clubhouse. You found this stuff on forums, on a slow connection, and the only people who got the joke were the people who'd been there.

The Rickroll (2007–2008)

If you've ever clicked a link expecting one thing and gotten a 1987 Rick Astley music video instead, congratulations, you've been part of internet history.

Rickrolling started on 4chan around May 2007. Someone posted a link claiming to be a Grand Theft Auto IV trailer, and it went straight to "Never Gonna Give You Up." It grew out of an earlier, weirder prank called the duckroll. But Rick had something the duck didn't: a ridiculously catchy song and a dance you couldn't unsee.

Then it went mainstream fast. On April 1, 2008, YouTube itself rickrolled the entire internet by making every featured video on its homepage go to the song. That November, Rick Astley showed up on a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and rickrolled the whole country on live TV.

The rickroll is the purest meme ever made, because it's a bait-and-switch that nobody can actually be mad at. Almost twenty years later, it still works. Somebody's going to get rickrolled today.

Trollface (2008)

This is the one I remember showing up.

On September 19, 2008, an artist named Carlos Ramirez posted an MS Paint comic to DeviantArt. It was about the pointlessness of trolling on 4chan, and it had a face in it: that wide, smug, mischievous grin that everybody on the internet would recognize within a year.

It spread through 4chan, then into rage comics, the crude, hand-drawn comic strips that took over Reddit around 2009. Trollface became the universal symbol for "I did this on purpose and I'm proud of it." You saw it on forums, on T-shirts, on bathroom stall doodles.

Here's the part I love: Ramirez registered the copyright in 2010. A doodle he made in MS Paint went on to earn him, by his own count, over $100,000 in licensing and settlements. That's the most "money grinding" story in meme history, and a reminder that somebody always made the thing everybody's sharing.

Scumbag Steve (2011)

By 2011, Reddit had become meme headquarters, and the format of the day was the image macro: a photo, big white Impact-font text on top, a punchline on the bottom.

In January 2011, a compilation hit Reddit's front page featuring a photo of a guy in baggy clothes and a sideways fitted cap, standing in a hallway. The captions turned him into Scumbag Steve, the friend who borrows your lighter and keeps it, shows up to your party and invites thirty strangers, asks for a ride and doesn't chip in for gas. Everybody knew a Steve.

But Steve was a real person. His name is Blake Boston, and his mom took the photo. Within weeks, the internet had found him. News outlets were writing about his "reaction to fame." He leaned into it, started a Twitter and a Tumblr, and tried to turn it into a rap career.

Scumbag Steve was the moment memes got personal. Up until then, the faces were cartoons and video game villains. Now they were real people, and some of them never asked to be famous.

What the memes taught me

I could do this all day (Bad Luck Brian, Success Kid, the Dramatic Chipmunk), but here's what I take from these four.

Culture can't be manufactured. Not one of these was made to go viral. They were a bad translation, a prank, a doodle and a family photo. Every brand that's ever tried to force a meme has learned that the hard way.

The tech shaped the joke. All Your Base was forums and Flash. The rickroll needed YouTube. Trollface grew up in rage comics. Scumbag Steve was Reddit. Today it's TikTok sounds and AI remixes. Every platform gets the memes it deserves.

There's always a person behind it. A translator having a bad day. A guy with MS Paint. A kid whose mom took his picture. It's easy to forget that, and it's worth remembering before you laugh at the next one.

Inside jokes build communities. Getting the reference meant you were there. That feeling, of belonging to something because you understood it, is what every good community runs on, online or off.

And if you didn't get any of these references, don't worry. Somebody set up us the bomb a long time ago, and we've all been catching up ever since.

— g