AYBABTU, an Internet Phenomenon
Dotcoms may be crashing, but Internet phenomena are going nowhere. It used to be just chain letters and joke forwards, but now friends seem to bombard me with an increasingly bizarre array of forwards and links, such as the one that led me to the [home page of a pansexual Florida man] living out his fantasy of becoming more like Peter Pan. These ephemera build incredible momentum in a very short period of time. A link will start out in the hands of a few hundred people, and by the end of the week hundreds of thousands will be in the know. Sociologists have a word for this; I don't, but I was the first person in my office to receive "All Your Base Are Belong to Us."
As I write this, I'd estimate that a million people know what that phrase means, or doesn't mean. By the time you read it, probably another million will have been added to the fold.
A short description and history: AYBABTU is a phrase taken from a badly translated video game. In 1989, Sega released an English version of the game Zero Wing, a typically mundane galactic shoot-'em-up. The introduction to the game depicts a takeover in space by the evil C.A.T.S., who speaks the phrase above as well as some other gems. My favorite is, "Somebody set up us the bomb," a motto that rises to fit many occasions in my life. As a piece of Japan-pop kitsch, AYBABTU is quite strong. I'd say it beats Hello Kitty hands down, and is probably superior to Cibo Matto as well. But of course all kitsch requires a commercial vehicle to spread. Hello Kitty has a clothing line; Cibo Matto has mediocre pop music. Thus, the AYBABTU video was spawned.
According to what I could decipher from the mildly technical history on the [AYBABTU website], the video seems to have grown organically. At first, sometime in 1998, the intro from the Zero Wing game started to circulate among gamers and their ilk. Then, in various online forums, people began Photoshopping the phrase onto various monuments and signifiers of daily American life. They would then add the altered picture to the AYBABTU video. Somewhere along the line, it also acquired a bad techno beat and the repeated chanting, by a computerized voice, of "All your base," pause, pause, "are belong to us." Among the shots are a McDonald's billboard with AYBABTU digitized above the "99 Billion Served" sign, and AYBABTU on the wraparound ticker in Times Square. The video credits, at the end, such shadowy, typical hacker names as Legomancer and Raider.
All this happened late in 2000, and by January the thing was circulating madly. By the beginning of February, I had received it from my Internet consultant roommate who knew I would want to be the first in my office. I duly sent it around, and was a minor hero for a day or two. By March, when the techies were well sick of it, it hit the papers, with stories in the San Francisco Chronicle and Time.
The fad's pretty well burnt out by now, but you can always count on sulky, alternative teenage girls to give it one more go-round. I was walking by the MTV studios a few days ago, around TRL time, when I saw, behind the blue police barricade with the Backstreet Boys-sign-carrying Midwesterners, two 16-year-old girls with died black hair and Williamsburg bobs. One was toting an AYBABTU sign. When asked why she was carrying the sign, she said, "It's an inside joke." I told her I knew the joke. She brightened a little, and boasted, "All the people walking by are giving me strange looks. They think I'm either weird or threatening." Then she added, hastily, "I don't watch the show." With reportorial work completed for the afternoon, I strolled home.