Before the Internet: The World’s Oldest Known Meme

All your base are belong to us!

If you think this phrase sounds weird grammatically, you’d be correct. It was mistranslated from Japanese in a 1989 Mega Drive game “Zero Wing”. For some unknown reason this phrase became a real hit in early 2000s, especially with the gamer community. Blizzard even included it as a cheat code in StarCraft, which gave you 100,000 of each resource.

ROFLCOPTER

ASCII art has always been the upper echelon of memes. Most of them were annoying as hell but very memorable, which was the point. It’s basically a depiction of a helicopter but instead of the blades it has LOL and ROFL. It’s dumb but it works! Also it’s fun to say out loud – ROFLCOPTER. Heheh.

In conclusion, here’s my question to you: Do you remember your first meme ever? What’s your current favorite?

Mine was the “I can haz cheezburger” cat. Lolcats for life!

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