OMG: All Your Base is 20 Years Old

As I was going through my feed reader recently, I came across an article from Ars Technica, that I’d skipped over when it first came out, which announced that the All Your Base Meme is now 20 years old. I couldn’t believe it. It was my first meme, a few years before Numa Numa would be the meme that crossed over into regular pop culture. It led me to The Laziest Men on Mars’ page on Mp3.com, which was a kind of proto- Bandcamp in the early 2000s where indie bands (and some commercial bands) would put up MP3s to gain followers. ( This ended up being my favorite song from The Laziest Men on Mars) Here is the video that took over all of us on the Internet 20 years ago:

Yeah, I’m sure you’re wondering how in the world that was a thing anyone cared about. But, much in the same way that I wonder how anyone could ever enjoy most of early cinema, it was a different time on the Internet then. A time when putting together an amateur video and getting it to everyone was just starting to be feasible. And it got so embedded into my brain that about six so years ago I got the following shirt when I went to the Defcon conference:

all your base shirt

Yeah, there’s a lot of geekiness contained in that one shirt.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed that trip down memory lane or, if you’re a young millenial or Gen Z are shaking your head at what we late Gen X/early millenials found entertaining.

• Meme