There is still time before the robot overlords take over. The smartest geeks in the room maintain hegemony over radio-controlled ultimate fighting machines for now, with the best currently coming from all over the world to compete at BattleBots Destruct-A-Thon in Las Vegas. It’s mechanical carnage on a scale previously unachieved before the BattleBots World Championship began taping at Caesars Entertainment Studios last year.
This week, the venue begins hosting live shows at BattleBots Arena Thursdays through Sundays, in which competitors spin, pound, hack, scoop and shove each other into hazards that pummel and immobilize. Destruction devices familiar to viewers of the BattleBots Discovery network series such as Witch Doctor, Kraken, Mammoth, Hypershock and Whiplash will compete to the death against new monsters of metal.
Battling robots have been on television for several decades, but the pastime’s roots reach back further to the turbulent ’70s and Survival Research Laboratories. SRL was an industrial art answer to punk rock, more installations than competitions. Innovatively conceived and constructed machines breathed fire, weathered explosions and attacked each other in demolition spectacles that were absurd, violent, noisy and extremely entertaining.
Denver was the site of the first clash for robot supremacy, Critter Crunch, in 1987. Four years later, Atlanta hosted the first machine melee on the East Coast. BattleBots, adapted from British TV series Robot Wars, made its American television debut on Comedy Central in 2000. By that time, an entire generation had grown up with awareness of killer robots. Student groups from MIT to Stanford University raised the stakes year by year.
The show went on hiatus for more than a decade before being revived by ABC in 2016, then picked up by Discovery in 2018. There are methods to the madness, rules of the game. Budding bot builders submit designs for armored assailants that must be approved by BattleBots before construction begins. Robots can walk, hop, roll, fly or slither, as long as they can move in a controlled manner without damaging the arena. Maximum weight is 250 pounds.
What the producers and audiences really want to see is awesome weapons. Many of the pounding and hacking gadgets look innocuous until whipping into action. Clamps can be powerful grasping tools that neutralize opponents by flipping them over or maneuvering them into BattleBots Arena’s huge horizontal turning screws. Woe be unto any robot that does not have the ability to right itself after being turned upside down.
The fighting is adrenalizing, with crunching impacts and sparks flying from powerful grinding wheels driving live audiences into frenzies. Half the fun is arbitrarily rooting for a fighting robot and feeling the elation of victory or sharing deflation of defeat with the losing team. The only things that get hurt are feelings when the aspirations of bot builders are chopped to pieces or hammered into oblivion before their eyes. On the bright side, the lessons of loss will inspire the designs of the next champions to emerge from the warscape of BattleBots Destruct-A-Thon.
Caesars Entertainment Studios at Horseshoe Las Vegas, Feb. 3-5, 9-11, 16-19, 23-26, times vary, ticketmaster.com
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