Zero Wing
A 1989 horizontal shoot 'em up arcade game that was also ported a year later to the PC Engine CD-ROM (known outside of Japan as the TurboGrafx-CD) only in Japan and the SEGA Mega Drive (SEGA Genesis in America) only in Japan and Europe.
It didn't catch much attention, due to being viewed by many to be just another unoriginal horizontal space shoot 'em up while lacking advertisements. It stayed obscure until late 2000 when the opening of the European version of its SEGA Mega Drive port was discovered as a mistranslation and was used by Kansas City computer programmer and part-time DJ, Jeffrey Ray Roberts, then aged 23, from the Gabber band "The Laziest Men on Mars" created a techno dance track titled "Invasion of the Gabber Robots", which remixed some of the Zero Wing video game music by Tatsuya Uemura, Toshiaki Tomisawa, and Masahiro Yuge, with electronic versions of the quotes from its intro. Most notably "All your base are belong to us", said by an antagonist named CATS, which is similar to "owned", a slang word that originated among 1990s hackers, where it referred to "rooting" or gaining administrative control over another person's PC. This became an Internet meme for a long period of time and is still being used today, even against the arcade and PC Engine CD-ROM versions, although they lack the infamous opening and don't show CATS nor Engrish.
It didn't catch much attention, due to being viewed by many to be just another unoriginal horizontal space shoot 'em up while lacking advertisements. It stayed obscure until late 2000 when the opening of the European version of its SEGA Mega Drive port was discovered as a mistranslation and was used by Kansas City computer programmer and part-time DJ, Jeffrey Ray Roberts, then aged 23, from the Gabber band "The Laziest Men on Mars" created a techno dance track titled "Invasion of the Gabber Robots", which remixed some of the Zero Wing video game music by Tatsuya Uemura, Toshiaki Tomisawa, and Masahiro Yuge, with electronic versions of the quotes from its intro. Most notably "All your base are belong to us", said by an antagonist named CATS, which is similar to "owned", a slang word that originated among 1990s hackers, where it referred to "rooting" or gaining administrative control over another person's PC. This became an Internet meme for a long period of time and is still being used today, even against the arcade and PC Engine CD-ROM versions, although they lack the infamous opening and don't show CATS nor Engrish.
Most people thought Toaplan was responsible for the mistranslated opening of the European Mega Drive version of Zero Wing, but it was actually SEGA of Europe's.
Zero Wing by 1983parrothead July 19, 2009
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