Wednesday, 17 December 2008
All Your Base Are Belong to Us
It's time for a poem in English this time:
In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody 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.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ....
Operator: Captain !!
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice.
This is of course the introduction to the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive game Zero Wing, and was not intentional poetry. Rather it is the most famously egregious case of bad Japanese-to-English translation, something that Western gamers struggled with regularly in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.
That said, however, it is one of the most quoted texts in the history of the internet age, and after the De-CSS haiku, the poem that I would consider most representative of our unpoetic age. Not only that, but I'm sure that most of the confused kids playing the game thought that the odd language was intended to be poetic.
As a poem, too, "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" holds up rather well. One proof being that it is so eminently quotable. I have seen separate references not only to the celebrated "all your base are belong to us" but also "somebody set up us the bomb", "how are you gentlemen !!", "what you say !!", "you have no chance to survive make your time", and of course, "for great justice". And if I ever have a voice-activated television or computer, you can bet I will program it to respond to "main screen turn on"!
We're not quite to the point where we have an instance of a famous poem created by a computer, but in some ways I feel like "All Your Base" comes close :-)
