The other team showed up in matching polos. The blueprint design on the collar adds an elegant touch to gladiator chic. Not for how they built the robot, but for what they wore to this match. While we’re waiting for them to recover, I’d like to pause for a moment and appreciate the attention to detail exhibited by Complete Control’s engineering team. “It’s like they’re trying to regain consciousness!” the announcer yells. The bots hit each other so hard to open the match they spent the next 60 seconds wobbling like Jello. Complete Control clamps onto Bombshell, envelops it like a Venus flytrap, and then lifts it into the air and scorches it with the tenderness of love letter to Prometheus.īombshell’s battered corpse lands underneath the pulverizer and inches from the gift it brought into the match. Apparently whoever is at the controls was drunk, because the drone crashes without being touched.
The following year, Bombshell took a dig at Complete Control by entering this match with an empty gift-wrapped box as a taunt (spoiler: it didn’t work).Ĭomplete Control (the claw machine that shoots flames) tries to grab Bombshell (the one with the gift) as Complete Control’s drone (which also shoots flames) hovers overhead. Nets aren’t technically illegal, but they are highly frowned upon, and the incident caused a kerfuffle in the BattleBots community. In the previous year’s tournament, Complete Control (the one with wheels and fire) beat Ghost Raptor by hiding a net in a gift-wrapped box that exploded on impact. I have no idea why a potted plant was mounted on wheels, but there is a story behind the birthday present. Within 17 seconds, a drone takes flight, a robot digging a battle axe into a birthday present gets suplexed, and a potted plant (?) gets tossed asunder. Here’s actual exchange between announcers in this video:Īnnouncer 1: “He’s roasting him like a marshmallow, Chris!”Īnnouncer 2: “If so grab the chocolate and the graham crackers, I want some s’mores!” To put the bots’ destructive power in perspective, here’s a Battlebot named Tombstone taking on a bowling ball. Those engineers are very, very good at their jobs. It’s everything you imagined doing with power tools as a kid fulfilled by teams of engineers from across the globe. Bots that stay in the middle get skewered by “kill saws” that rise out of the ground like the tigers in Gladiator. Bots that get too close to the walls are smashed by giant hammers. There are knives and axes and drones with flamethrowers.
Surely the pinnacle of human innovation is a televised March Madness-style tournament in which robot gladiators try to smash, squeeze, slice, and melt their opponents with military-grade weaponry. While there may not be many human sports going on this summer, Elon Musk says we will soon live in a posthuman world, so it’s the perfect time to dive into the best posthuman sport: BattleBots.īattleBots is why God invented electricity. Something needs to fill the void between Woj tweets. EDT (baseball doesn’t count because nobody has watched an entire baseball game since 2007). We’re fortunate to have a World Cup this year, but there are still no sports to watch after 4:30 p.m. Summertime is no-man’s land for sports fans.