Re: Someone set up us the bomb

From: Mike Masnick (mike@techdirt.com)
Date: Wed Feb 21 2001 - 12:22:26 PST


At 01:27 PM 2/21/01 -0600, cdale@silly.techmonkeys.net wrote:
>I was wondering if my question had made it to the list. (:

This was also talked about on Salon yesterday (scroll down):

http://www.salon.com/tech/inbox/index.html/index.html

The truth revealed: "All your base are belong to us"

In A.D. 2001

War was beginning

And the translators of an obscure chapter from the Sega version of the late
'80s arcade game ZeroWing were turning in their graves. Why had this
travesty of translation come back to haunt them? "Give us a break!" they
cried, beseeching meme-hungry Net addicts to stop broadcasting ZeroWing's
clumsy Japanglish all over town. But it was too late.

Captain: What happen?
Mechanic: Someone set up us the bomb
Operator: We get signal
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.

Captain: It's you!!
Cats: How are you gentlemen!!
Cats: All your base are belong to us

Just a little careless dialogue scripting and a thousand Web sites bloomed,
broadcasting this shoddy video game translation to the masses. As
pranksters rushed to plaster that curiously catchy ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG
TO US on every possible surface (a banner behind Colin Powell and Norman
Schwartzkopf, T-shirts,Vanna White's Wheel of Fortune puzzle, across a
dozen Shriners' red caps), the rest of us asked ourselves "but what's the
point?"

Maybe the point is that there is no point. But if there is, do not expect
to find it on ZeroWing. Freed from the dusty corners of video game arcana
ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US offers only this prognosis:

Cats: You are on the way to destruction. --Amy Standen [2:15 p.m. PST, Feb.
21, 2001]



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