All Your Base Are Belong To Us
A line from the careless English translation of a 1991 Japanese Mega Drive game which, a decade later, became the internet's first genuinely large image meme.
The game was Zero Wing and the opening sequence was meant to explain that the enemy had captured the player's bases. The translation turned it into a sentence of grammatically impossible English that was nonetheless perfectly comprehensible, which is exactly the combination that makes something quotable. For a few years the screenshot circulated on forums like Something Awful, and in February 2001 came the tipping point: a Flash animation that pasted the text onto photographs of signs, packaging and landmarks around the world, set to a techno remix. After that the phrase turned up in graffiti, on university noticeboards and in news broadcasts. It was the first time a joke went global with no platform helping it along.