Those of you had early access to the Best & Worst articles via Patreon already knew this post was coming, but for everyone else you’re probably just seeing this right now unless the fact that I chose to run two articles celebrating all the highest and lowest points of this website clued you in to the fact that things were possibly shutting down soon. This is the third article after all, and you know what they say about “things coming in threes”. (Also just as an aside this post just so happens to be the 200th live article on BattleBots Update.) I’ve taken my victory lap and whatever the lap is called when everything sucks? I think that’s a hazard lap, like when Dale Earnhardt crashed into the wall and fucking died. It’s okay though, Dale’s legacy lives on as a Giant Washer Award in the annals of what is now the largest archive of sarcastic commentary on robot combat available on the entire world wide web. But yeah that’s two laps and now it’s time to tie up all the loose ends and for me to impart some meaningful words to you all at some point.
BUT WHY?
Let’s just get down to brass tacks right from the start because I know this is the question on everyone’s minds. I touched on this in the early access post on Patreon however I realize not everyone reading this article had access to the Patreon link so I’ll go back and cover all the bases so nothing gets left out.
BattleBots, the show, has been on a gradual decline for a while now. This is just something that happens to all shows eventually and it’s not specific to BattleBots. I’d say World Championship IV (2019) was the high point in the series reboot in terms of viewership and the size and activity of the community surrounding the show. From that point things began to slowly decline. That’s not to imply that there was anything wrong with World Championships V – VII, quite the opposite as those were incredible seasons. It’s just that the viewership and audience participation for these seasons was not as substantial as it was back in 2019. It was a damn good show but people just weren’t really paying attention anymore. There were a lot of “fairweather fans” in the community at its apex in 2019 and eventually they lost interest for whatever reason and moved on. Again, this happens to television shows and the communities built around them all the time. People move from one big thing to the next. Diehard fans like you and I are, unfortunately, not the majority when it comes to these kinds of things. That’s just the reality.
World Championship VII took place in October 2022. We are now half way through 2024, nearly two full years later, and we don’t even have so much as a ballpark estimate for the potential dates of filming VIII. More time has passed between World Championship VII and today than the time between II and III when BattleBots was switching whole ass networks from ABC to Discovery Channel. That was a huge deal and yet it was hammered out in less time than it’s taken for BattleBots to negotiate a new contract with Warner Bros Discovery, the horrifying cancerous conglomerate that formed when Warner Bros bought out Discovery Communications two years ago. Buyouts like that are literally everything that’s wrong with the entertainment industry today because the first thing the brainless executives at the newly formed WB/Disc did was start trimming the fat and cancelling or closing shit left and right because they just spent enough money to equate to the entire GDP of fucking Bolivia. They don’t see the inherent value in things the way we the fans do, they just see things only in the absolutely fucking stupid context of “number go up”.
The point I’m trying to make here is that when it comes to World Championship VIII… it doesn’t look good. I hope I am wrong but I think the 2022 season is going to be the last one. BattleBots had a two-season contract they signed with Discovery before that disaster of a merger and this contract remained valid even as Warner Bros was in the process of laying claim to everything. They were contractually obligated to proceed with the taping and production of World Championship VII because violating the contract likely came with penalties that were viewed as more inconvenient than just seeing the contract through to completion and then never forging another one allowing Warner Bros to “quietly cancel” the series. I am not trying to blackpill anyone who is holding out hope for another season. There are just a lot of red flags pointing to nothing good. But again like I said I want to be proven wrong on all of this because just like you I simply love BattleBots and I want it to continue indefinitely, however I also acknowledge that this just isn’t possible and everything ultimately has to come to an end some time. Case in point.
That’s one side of the coin. The other is the composition of the fandom surrounding BattleBots. A cross-section of the community today would be so substantially different from one taken in 2015 that if you were to actually somehow do this a layperson would probably think they were looking at two different communities entirely. As the community surrounding a given pop culture thing builds up the quality of this community becomes inversely proportional to its size. Again, this happens to literally everything on the planet and this isn’t something specific to BattleBots. You can name anything and if you trace its community back to its formation and then follow through from there you will see it grow and gradually deteriorate. This in turn causes the original fanbase to leave or otherwise cease participating in the fandom because it becomes, essentially, uninhabitable.
I really don’t know how to explain this phenomenon using language that won’t just piss off all the usual suspects. This is very much an ideological thing, make no mistake, and that’s what pisses me off because robot combat is not something that needs this kind of tone policing. There are many examples I’ve faced personally but to illustrate my point here’s just one of them. I have a vague memory from several years ago where I tried to find the language to politely explain that the robot combat community just cannot take any sort of adversity whatsoever. I can’t remember the exact context but I was respectful with my statement because this was a comment in a public place and people still tried to jump down my throat because I had the audacity to call a spade a spade. Their actions proved exactly what I was trying to explain and I am positive they were completely unaware of this. Things have only gotten worse since.
It’s a very discouraging experience. I felt unwelcome literally everywhere. Part of that is my fault because I’m a hard ass but the blame isn’t entirely on me alone because the entire online sphere is absolute dog shit these days and creating content for it is nowhere near as fun as it was two decades ago thanks to the widespread adoption of smartphones lowering the barrier of entry to the internet.
After years of being sidelined by the ever-changing BattleBots fandom as well as the gradual entropy eroding away at the perceived thrill of the show I ultimately just decided it was time to throw in the towel. BattleBots Update was one of the first (possibly even the first because it launched mere days after the first episode of the 2015 reboot aired) fanmade content outlets that came around when the series was rebooted. It has outlived every single one of its contemporaries, even the ones that were more popular or successful. I wrote over 200 goddamned articles about this show. That’s an estimated 1.65 million fucking words. No one can ever say that I never cared about this show or that I was in this for some stupid ass ulterior motive. I invested nearly a decade of my life working on this project as an absolute labor of love. I am very appreciative that this dedication was noticed by all the right people back in 2015/2016, but that was a long time ago and the effort I put into this website is seemingly lost on the current generation of BattleBots fans and participants.
BattleBots Update accrued just under 5,000 likes on Facebook which is a number higher than the counts of many of the teams who competed on the actual fucking show. In the early years of the reboot fans were following me more than they were following the actual competitors. That’s how “The BBU Bump” was created; I would plug the Facebook page of one of the competitors who had less followers than this project in the hopes that I could drive some traffic their way. The way I saw things I’m just the dumbass who tells lame jokes, I shouldn’t have more followers than the team behind Skorpios or something who literally built an entire goddamned robot and successfully competed on television with it. The only competitors who had more followers than me were the champions and some of the more noteworthy teams like Hypershock (purely because of the thing with the rake) and Witch Doctor. I promise I am trying not to sound like I am bragging here but it’s hard to put these numbers into historical perspective without making these kinds of comparisons. BattleBots Update was a big deal at one point in time but that notability is entirely backloaded. I hit 4,000 likes on Facebook years ago and things have been stagnant for several years now. I have all those followers and yet when I post links to promote new content on this website maybe two dozen people like the post? I get a couple of comments? If I post a link to something outside of BBU then I barely get any engagement at all.
People have moved on, that much is very obvious. The entire six episode mini-season of BattleBots Champions II is absent from this website and not a single person has asked me about that in the past 18 months. Not once. Nevermind, literally four days before this post was set to go live someone in the /r/BattleBots community asked me about Champions II. Talk about a buzzer beater.
NO RAGRETS
I suppose the second most popular question is “do I have any regrets”, or more specifically “are there any things that I wanted to do that I never got to”.
Well, yes. At one point I had plans to double back and write articles for all five seasons of BattleBots from the Comedy Central era. I got started on that but mid-way through the endeavor Hurricane Harvey happened and fucked everything up. I just never picked it back up. The series reboot continued onward and I dutifully followed it as it aired but I never found the time to go back to what I’d started to complete it. I also had plans to write articles about the Chinese events King of Bots and Clash Bots but obviously that never happened. When those events took place we were neck deep in both BattleBots and Robot Wars (which had been revived in 2016) and I was struggling to keep up with those two. Russia also had some live events going on and I had plans to compile a bunch of fights into a supercut video and write a special post (or series of posts) about it. South Korea had a robot event and show called Robot Power that looked interesting. I also had this asshole idea to compile a bunch of robot fights from Indian social media pages which were notorious for their blatant disregard of safety and make a whole article about it all that would almost definitely be considered “racist” or some stupid shit today.
What I’ve covered so far are just in regards to writing articles about robot combat specifically, but I know the “do you have any regrets” question can also refer to things I’ve actually done that I wish I hadn’t. That’s also a yes but I feel like I went into all of those things in the “Worst Of” article. I made a promise to myself when I started writing this final post that I wasn’t going to mention “those people” a single time because for the past five fucking years I’ve never shut up about it and I feel like that’s one of the things that really messed with my reputation and how the wider community perceived me. It was the fragments of another era of my life cross-contaminating what was supposed to be a fresh start. I got my life sorted out a few years ago and mentally I’m feeling and doing a hell of a lot better than I was when I first started this blog. I regret that I allowed my unchecked mental illness to run absolutely rampant on this website when I was at my very worst. There is an entire chunk of this website spanning literal years that I am ashamed of, I just never talk about it.
I am genuinely grateful that I managed to stay as damage invisible as I did throughout the past nine years because I know I had my moments that were worthy of “further scrutiny”. People have talked about me and this website since it was created, good, bad, or otherwise. I tried keeping tabs on it all but I eventually realized that was extremely paranoid behavior and eventually I just accepted the fact that there are going to be people who do not like me for whatever reason and the best way to handle matters was to just be honest in everything I did. Despite my very obvious fuck ups my goal was to deliver the best content I could make and in the end I think the sincerity of my creation is what allowed me to succeed.
LOOKING BACK / FACING FORWARD
Those who are familiar with the history of this website know that this isn’t my first rodeo. BattleBots Update can be traced back to 2008 where it was the final column I wrote for the long dead comedy site RFSHQ. In 2006 I sent my personal collection of VHS tapes of BattleBots to a friend to be digitized. Our plan was to upload an episode of BattleBots every week and the following day post the corresponding article to the BattleBots Update column. No one was putting Comedy Central episodes online back then, we were the first. The problem is that in 2008 bandwidth was still a thing you had to worry about when hosting a website and even though YouTube had come into existence you might recall 2008 falling into that era where Viacom was incredibly litigious with people uploading copyrighted content onto the platform. Viacom owned Comedy Central. There was no way we were getting whole ass episodes of BattleBots onto YouTube because also in 2008 there was a length limit of 10 minutes on uploaded videos unless you were accepted into the Director program which you had to go through an entire application process for. (For the record I did have Director permissions but I wasn’t willing to jeopardize my account by uploading episodes of the show.)
The original 2008 iteration of BattleBots Update survived to the point where we were uploading episodes of the second season but I abruptly left the project to start making bad decisions that would ironically come back to bite me in the ass seven years later when BattleBots Update was rebooted. Literally everything in my life came full circle the second time around, not just the bad things. The guy I sent the VHS tapes to? Yeah, he’s the server administrator for where this website is currently hosted as we speak. You never really stray too far from the people you meet. Also he lost my fucking tapes. I eventually forgave him for that.
I remember when I heard the news that BattleBots was coming back on the air. I was at work and the first thing I did is I registered the domain battlebotsupdate.com. According to the WHOIS information I did this on June 2, 2015. The first episode of the BattleBots reboot aired on June 21. The timestamp on the very first working draft of my article covering the first episode is June 22 meaning I was on this shit literally as soon as it aired and the article was finished and posted on the 25th. The same day I bought the domain I also bought an antenna for my television since ABC broadcasts over the airwaves. Either I lived in a dead zone or the antenna was a total piece of shit but in order to watch BattleBots every week in 2015 I had to set my TV up in my fucking dining room and put the antenna all the way up against the windows. I was willing to put up with this bullshit because my love of this sport and show overrode the receptors in my brain that were telling me all this effort was stupid. Yeah, I could just hit up EZTV for a torrent of the episode (which I did so I could get screenshots for the articles) but I wanted to watch this show as it aired just like I did in the 2000’s when I’d begrudgingly listen to the last five minutes of whatever the fuck Jimmy Kimmel had to say on The Man Show before BattleBots started. Because fate works in mysterious ways as I sat in my dining room fucking with a cheap antenna 12 years later I still had to sit through five minutes of Kimmel because that motherfucker’s talk show also aired on ABC.
The immediate reception to BattleBots Update puzzled a lot of people because it was a hell of a lot more abrasive than it eventually became in its later years. I was inspired by a website called Driving The Death Car which did sarcastic reviews of fights during the Comedy Central era so I channeled that into BattleBots Update. A few people, namely Ray Billings, recognized me as the little shit that insulted everyone in 2011 when I wrote a post about the Science Channel special about Robogames. I think that initial connection to the one shot from 2011 is what helped me get my foot in the door. Ray and some of the other competitors from 2015 knew that I was just fucking around for the sake of being obnoxious and their early support of the newly relaunched BattleBots Update is what helped this project take off. Other competitors who were on the fence about how this website was treating their robots eventually took up the mindset of “well if Ray and the others are cool with it then I guess I can laugh a little too”. This eventually spread to Trey Roski and Greg Munson who were passively familiar with me already because in 2014 I’d written a couple of short articles documenting “the worst BattleBots of all time” and the line of MiniBots collectible toys. Everything just kind of clicked and fell into place all at the same time and by the time World Championship II came around I was being invited out to attend the taping completely on the house.
The “on the house” thing was a gesture that was extended to me specifically for World Championship II but I wound up going to pretty much every single taping of the show after that excluding the ones affected by the COVID pandemic. Not everything was a free ride which is why I hooked up with some people to travel with and the access that my minor celebrity status afforded them was essentially my side of the trade-off. I was still paying for airfare and all of that too, it’s just when I got to the doors to the venue the guy up there did the “you’re on the list, welcome to BattleBots” routine with me and that was fucking awesome. I had access to the pits almost whenever I wanted and I also had free reign to peruse the green room and drink eight cans of Red Bull if that’s what I wanted to do. It wasn’t, so instead I drank seven cans and ate half of the meat and cheese spread the catering company had set up.
I’ve never been treated the way that BattleBots treated me while I was there. And I’m not even famous, but for a few fleeting weeks over this past decade I was a king. Prior to restarting BattleBots Update (and a little ways into it) I would do annual tours to anime and gaming conventions in Texas and perform stand-up comedy. In the hierarchy of convention guests this put me at the absolute bottom. Nobody gave a single fuck whether I showed up or not. There were some conventions where the organizers never even acknowledged that I was there and performed for their guests. For a lot of the cons I went to I wasn’t given access to their green rooms because those places were reserved for the people above me like some fucking nobody whose only claim to fame is voicing one character in the English dub of Sailor Moon for 9 episodes in the early 90’s. Or Kevin Sorbo.
Chances are I will never reach this level of “fame” again in my lifetime. I’m almost 40 now, the dream is ending. 2015 was a landmark year for me. I had back-to-back hits with BattleBots Update and the web series Your Level SUCKS which was produced for my YouTube channel, Gatorbox. I’ve been pursuing comedy and entertainment since 1995. Those early years are negligible because I was literally just a kid but as I’ve gotten older I’ve consistently failed to parlay my talents into anything meaningful. Gatorbox continues to live on (for now) despite the fact that the uploads on the channel never hit more than 50 views. Compare that to 2015 when the channel’s breakout series received thousands of views and this rubbed off on the surrounding content which received hundreds of views of their own. I genuinely just do this because it’s fun to me. I like to create things and sometimes a few people will look my way and say they appreciate what I do. I never really made any money from BattleBots Update and Nintendo copyright claimed the entirety of Your Level SUCKS so I never saw a single dime from that. It’s not about the money to me, it’s about the experience of creating something fun that other people like.
When I started outlining this article and got to this section I considered making this massive list of “special thanks” where I itemized out every person who helped make this entire mess possible. As I worked on the list it quickly ballooned out to over 50 people and I realized that if I was going to name this many people there was a high chance I’d inevitably miss someone and I really don’t want anyone to feel left out. I think in lieu of the most awkward credits roll possible I’m just going to sort of leave things open ended. There are dozens, possibly even hundreds, of people that I connected with during the near decade run of this project. Perhaps some of us did not meet under the best of circumstances, but for better or worse I am thankful that our paths crossed in some meaningful way. Taking the bad with the good I do not regret BattleBots Update and if I had the option I think I’d go back and do it all again.
All of you helped make a dream come true and words do not exist that would allow me to express my gratitude. When I sat alone in my bedroom taking apart RC cars and blenders in 1999 I never thought I’d ever be anywhere close to where I eventually made it. Thank you. God bless you all.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
I suppose by now you’re wondering what happens to BattleBots Update. Well, nothing really. This website and its content is not going anywhere. I’m not taking it down or making it otherwise unavailable. You can still come back here whenever you like and relive the good old days, if that phrase is applicable to this place. If I get time I might even go back and fix the formatting issues on this website’s earliest articles (I updated the theme a few years into the project and it messed up the red & blue info boxes for a lot of older fights). The only difference is that I have no plans to add any substantial amount of new content to this blog in the future. “For now.” I should also add that in because none of us know what the future holds in store. Never in a million years did I ever think BattleBots Update would get a second (or is it third) chance at life and yet here we are. Anything is always possible.
That’s what I’ve planned for this website, but you might also be wondering what I am going to do after this. Well, I am flattered. To answer that question, I don’t really know. The previously mentioned Gatorbox project is still an ongoing thing and years ago when I attempted to balance editing Gatorbox videos, doing Your Level SUCKS 2, and writing weekly BattleBots Update articles I wound up falling very far behind with editing my streams. I’m talking big time here, I am literally 2.5 years behind. I will likely never catch up with Gatorbox but at least that means I will pretty much never be short on content for that channel. Gatorbox has popped up a couple of times here even though I mostly tried keeping the projects separate, but the elevator pitch of the channel is it’s a live show where I play bad, obscure, unknown, or forgotten video games and crack jokes over them. I’ve played a shit load of games in the 13 years I’ve hosted the show so I’m absolutely positive that if you do enough digging you will find something on that channel that you really like. It’s basically all the same humor of this website just applied to video games as well as some other non-gaming related things.
BattleBots Update is technically part of my Twilight Foundry label. Twilight Foundry itself had a big “grand re-opening” thing in 2014 when its website at twilightfoundry.com launched after having been closed down for a decade. It contained an exhaustive archive of every single article and post that I and my cohorts had ever written from 2001 up to that point in time. It launched with a small staff of hobbyist writers and we got to work knocking out articles about weird pop culture stuff. But then BattleBots Update happened literally just a few months later and took off like a rocket. I couldn’t manage both things at the same time so Twilight Foundry’s shiny new website just withered and died after less than a dozen new articles. As of the posting of this article it’s still offline and has been for several years. I kind of want to revive it (again) and give it another shot just as a little side project or something. All of the other writers have surely moved on with their lives so it’ll just be me but that’s okay I suppose.
16 years ago I bought every issue of Nintendo Power (that had been published at the time) and the domain nintendopowerless.com. The very last article I wrote for the RFSHQ website was not an installment of BattleBots Update but rather a “pilot” of sorts for Nintendo Powerless, a column where I’d go through a given issue of the magazine and highlight all the amusing things that stood out to me. I bought all of the magazines with the intent to scan them and then cut out the funny parts. I waited so long to do this that now you can just download PDF’s of the entire publication’s history and screenshot them from Acrobat Reader. Oh well. The main issue is over the course of the past sixteen fucking years a lot of other people have entirely mined out the “Nintendo nostalgia” market far better than I probably could so Nintendo Powerless in 2024 would most likely be a massive flop. There are probably dozens of Tumblr blogs out there that have done mostly what I wanted to do not to mention the entire concept of going to a specific website just to see one feed of content as opposed to logging into a social media service and being fed an unending stream of algorithm slop is completely alien to the average internet user today.
I refuse to make content suitable for being shoveled into the faces of idiots by way of “the algorithm”. That pseudo-countercultural stance actually managed to work for BattleBots Update but it’s the main reason why Gatorbox has not really taken off in the 13 years I’ve worked on it. It sucks but sincerity and personal integrity won’t get you very far in a world dominated by shameless narcissism, outrage baiting, and ideological warfare. Such is life.
We’ve reached the end of this article and before we go our separate ways I have one last thing I want to share with you. Throughout the course of producing the content for this website I captured an unfathomable amount of screenshots from every episode of BattleBots (and Robot Wars) which I then sorted through and picked out the ones good enough to use in a given article. The images that you see on this website are perhaps not even ten percent of what I actually took. I’ve prepared one massive archive of every single photo and video still that I took while writing for this blog. Do with them what you please, they are my parting gift and a token of my appreciation for all of the support you’ve given me over the years.
A TREASURY OF CARNAGE: THIS IS BATTLEBOTS UPDATE
(28,635 FILES, 8.2 GB)
Thanks for everything over the past nine years. I don’t really have any plans to stay deeply involved with the community mostly for the reasons I outlined in this post, but I’ll probably still be “around”. It was fun while it lasted. Take care of yourselves out there.
– Draco