A brief guide to robot fighting
Robot fighting has been around as early as 1992. This is where UC Davis gradute of 1971, Marc Thorpe started attaching devices to vacuums in attempt to control vio radio waves. He would later go on to create the popular 90s robotic competition, Robot Wars. Marc’s “remote controlled mayhem” idea has birth nearly three decades of metallic combat that would spread all over the world.
Robot wars, the phenomena that originated in the UK was originally broadcasted on BBC TWO where Jeremy Clarkson presented the very first series. Red Darwf’s Craig Charles who took over presenting from the second up until the seventh series.
The live robot fight series exploded in the 90`s spawning other events, video games and more. In 1998, a Canadian group opened up a new robot fighting competition where competitors are welcomed to bring their own machines and encouraged to build robots.
Is bot fighting illegal?
Robot fighting involves the use of dangerous, custom made weponary. There is no real, official say to wether it is legal to hold your own tournaments with talented competitors.
In the early 90s, it was said the Marc Thorpe has had to combat legalities over his brand, Robot Wars. The case started when multiple events attempted to open up their own robot fighting events. In 1999, Long beach saw their first, legal robot fighting event launched by Trey Roski and Greg Munson. This was a start of another tournament inspired by Robot Wars, Battlebots.
When the first robot fighting competitons started, some weapons emerged that were considered unethical and our right dangerous to use. Altohugh, the builds were impressive, they clashed with the spirit of fighting robots. These weapons included;
- radio jamming,
- glue,
- corrosives
- lasers above 1 milliwatt
- explosives
- electrical discharge
Fire across the nation and worldwide was prohibited during competition. However, a few competitors have allowed the use of flame based weapons. Robotica allows limited amounts of flammable liquids where Battle-bots permits the use of flamethrowers
Robot fighting game
Videos games have been around for several decades providing entertainment for all of the generations to enjoy. In 1976, arades saw one of the very first fighting games released by Sega called Heavyweight Champ.
Robots have been a fascination for just as long, if not longer than the Heavyweight Champ Sega title. So with the large popularity of Robot wars, there is no surprise that robot fighting games have became a thing over time. Robot fighitng games come in many styles of combat, from transformers to the concepts in Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.
Notable games such as Twisted Metal ( for those who had a playstation 1 in 1995 ) shared a similar concept to Robot fighting. Instead of robots, you would drive a vehicle armed with various weaponary to out do the other competitors.
There are a number of Robot Wars video games and it’s variants that existed over time. From Robot Wars Extreme Descruction in 2001 to the 2016 title Robot Arena 3.
In 2019, a small team of indie developers created a more true to the show styled game called Robot Rumble 2. This robot fighting game appears to be a very in depth in creating your own fully customized, combat ready robot. The game includes robots that were built by Team TR3 and Team Shock, both who featured in the Robot Wars series.
Youtube robot fighting
Fans of the robot combat world would visit Youtube to view their most favorite bouts from the old series or from worldwide competitions. However, all fun and games were left aside when a different kind of robot fight took place online.
If you know YouTube, you’ll understand that YouTube along with Google have very powerful algorithms that dictates what can stay on their platform. In mid 2019, a new algorithm was introduced that removed hundreds of robot fighting videos for a number of channels.
The issue arose when the videos of robot fighting enthusiast’s channels were getting flagged or taken down. The algorithm mistook the robotic combat for animal abuse, leaving many to wonder the actual reason.
Robot rumble 2020
Nearly thirty years from the very first Robot fighting event held by Marc Thorpe, we still see reobotic competitions happening today.
If you are robot fighting junky in 2020, you can catch events from many places across the globe. Robot Combate Events feature events from primarily US, UK, Europe and Australia.
Who won Robot Wars 2019
The winner was Bite Force in the 2019 World Championship September 27th in episode 16. Witch Doctor was the opponent of Bite Force who lost
You might not of known but….
Robot Rumbles was listed on a sub directory of NASA as an activity, which believe it or not was the whole reason this post was written and why the link in this sentence was made haha << SEO experiment if you know then you know.
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