Marc Thorpe, the unique creator of the famed remote-controlled bot battling competitors Robotic Wars and godfather of right now’s bot deathmatch scene, died this previous Friday, Nov. 24, on the age of 77 because of issues from his lengthy battle in opposition to Parkinson’s illness. His demise was formally confirmed by his daughter Megan Feffer and on Thorpe’s personal website.
Shut to a few a long time in the past, there was the same old slate of TV violence, after which there was Robotic Wars and its later derivatives like the favored BattleBots collection. The exhibits have been manic, no-holds-barred demise matches that featured stomping, slamming, spinning, murderous, mauling, manic machine mayhem. With the identical sense and styling of a boxing match, the scenes might be far more brutal than two people slugging it out in a hoop. Robotic Wars arenas might contain environmental hazards like big nets, wrecking balls, or flamethrowers. It was a spectacle of robo-gladiatorial fight that sucked a technology of mechanical engineers into a complete new, visceral type of sport and impressed so many individuals to get into the sphere of robotics.
Thorpe was a San Francisco native who first made his identify on the leisure engineering scene with Industrial Lights and Magic the place he worked on the props and results for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies. He later labored at LucasToys, a subsidiary of Lucasfilm, the place he first devised the thought for Robotic Wars after sticking a vacuum cleaner on high of a remote-controlled tank, in keeping with Thorpe’s web site. Although he was identified with Parkinson’s that very same 12 months, his plan for a robotic rumble blossomed right into a full competitors and tv rights with the BBC within the UK.
Thorpe misplaced inventive management of Robotic Wars in 1997 after a collection of authorized wrangling along with his main sponsor Profile Information. He did shock followers in 1999 when he handed out one of many world championship trophies to Workforce Razer throughout The Third Wars run. Whereas Thorpe would typically be referenced because the “godfather” of RC battling robots, he wouldn’t stay too concerned in any of the spin-offs. In a 2016 Reddit AMA, Thorpe stated he didn’t watch BattleBots as a result of he didn’t “wish to be a customer to my very own dream.” He additionally described trendy renditions of battling robots as a “recreation present” including “I favor my format however the one they’re utilizing… clearly appeals to a big viewers.”
Marc is survived by his daughter and his two grandchildren, but in addition by the legacy of aggressive robotic demise matches. BBC rebooted Robot Wars in 2016 for a couple of new seasons again in 2016 earlier than ending its run on the eleventh collection a couple of years later. BattleBots, on the other hand, has seen constant renewals, with most up-to-date spinoffs together with exhibits like BattleBots: Champions airing on Discovery+.
The official BattleBots Twitter account shared simply how necessary Thorpe was to your entire legacy of rumbling robots, saying “This neighborhood begins with him, and through its darkest moments he held the torch.”
Robotic Wars was distinctive in that each one the violence was centered on the bots themselves, quite than folks. And the oldsters behind the controls have been engineers, AKA nerds, together with folks like Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters fame who initially acquired their begin within the 1995 U.S. Robotic Wars scene with their bot “Blendo.”
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