The phrase first appeared on the European release of the 1991 Sega Mega Drive / Genesis port of the 1989 Japanese arcade game.

[1] A music video accompanied by a techno remix of the clip, originally posted on the comedy forum Newgrounds, gained popularity and became a derivative Internet meme in its own right.

[8]: 250  According to game designer Tatsuya Uemara, the English skills of the team member who prepared the translations were "really terrible".

[11] In November 2000, Kansas City computer programmer and part-time disc jockey Jeffrey Ray Roberts (1977–2011), of the gabber band The Laziest Men on Mars, made a techno dance track, "Invasion of the Gabber Robots," which remixed some of the Zero Wing video game music with a voice-over of the phrase, "All your base are belong to us".

[14][15][16][17][18] The meme's popularity was seen throughout the early 2000s when it was broadcast unauthorized onto the ticker of a Raleigh, North Carolina, TV channel,[19] used as a placeholder message by YouTube while under maintenance,[20] and reproduced onto T-shirts.

Uemura stated that the poor English translation in the Mega Drive version was handled by a member of Toaplan in charge of export and overseas business.