The Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robot King

Down on the killing floor, with the 8,000 fans in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center Festival Pavilion agitating for combat, a large man with a large head and full red beard is wrestling a 312-pound robot. Trey Roski moves around Ginsu, trying to get the mecha-beast into its starting position without injuring himself on the jagged circular-saw blades that give the robot its lethal charm.

If this were just another super-heavyweight bout of fight-to-the-symbolic-death mechanized mayhem, Roski wouldn’t be nearly as nervous. But this June event is more than just a test of the robot he built with his cousin and business partner, Greg Munson; it’s the first time Roski’s pet-project, BattleBots (imagine an invention convention orchestrated by the World Wrestling Federation), will reach a national television audience on something other than a pay-per-view basis.

Cast and crew from Comedy Central are on hand to tape the event, which will be edited into 13 ESPN-style half-hour episodes to be aired at a later date. If all goes well, Roski knows, the ultra-violent, if bloodless, sport of robotic combat could become The Next Big Thing--a guilt-free alternative to the violent films and video games denounced last month by the Federal Trade Commission.

Roski’s more immediate concern, though, is Ronin, a formidable 307-pound contraption created by a Burbank roboteer. It looks like the love child of a Sherman tank and a commercial sawmill. Ronin is festooned with black Japanese battle flags--something right out of a Kurasawa epic--and is waiting inside the “BattleBox.” That 48-square-foot arena, smelling of hot metal and scorched rubber, is surrounded by 20-foot-high Lexan walls that protect the audience from the inevitable shrapnel of a BattleBots bout.

Throbbing industrial music floods the crowded spectator stands, where the growing frenzy suggests that Roski has indeed tapped into something primal. The fans clamor for action, pumped up by previous bouts in which smoke, sparks and parts flew through the air, and bot after bot was pummeled by sledgehammers, stabbed by spikes, chain-sawed, flipped, crushed, plowed, crippled, maimed and otherwise thrashed into the robotic equivalent of unconsciousness. Roski anxiously fingers Ginsu’s remote control.

He is, by all accounts, a gentle man. But he also knows that the fascination with violence “is inbred in all of us, even if we don’t want to admit it. I hate violence and people getting injured--hated it my whole life. [But] people want this for some reason. Why else would they love the WWF--the dumbest show I ever saw. In football there’s serious injury and anger. I don’t like it, I don’t believe in it, but people need it. It’s instinctual.”

Roski subscribes to what human-behavior experts call the “cathartic theory,” suggesting that robotic combat offers a healthy channel for natural aggression--equal parts creative engineering, applied technology and barbaric weaponry in the service of stress relief. “I wanted to do something that would get out the road rage without hurting anything,” he says. “It’s a game and it’s fun.”

The match begins. Working his remote control from just outside the Lexan arena, Roski maneuvers Ginsu toward its opponent. Ronin leads with its single 20-inch saw blade, flying across the arena floor on tank-like treads. The two robots collide, and Ronin plows the behemoth Ginsu toward the wall of the BattleBox. Within seconds, Ginsu is impaled on short metal spikes that line the wall’s low perimeter. Roski’s robot dies pathetically as its creator struggles to restart its motor. The judges declare Ronin the winner and Ginsu “incapacitated.”

A disappointed Roski drops his large head to his chest. He’d wanted to impress his father, Los Angeles developer Edward Roski Jr., his mother Gayle, wife Coleen and sister Katrina, who cheered his robot from just outside the BattleBox. But even Ginsu’s swift and stunning defeat can’t obscure the fact that Trey Roski, as co-founder and majority owner of BattleBots, Inc., is helping pioneer what may be the world’s coolest spectator sport.

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BEFORE COMEDY CENTRAL BEGAN AIRING THE FIRST OF THE “BattleBots” episodes taped that June night, Tony Fox knew that his upstart network had struck a nerve. “When we first made the announcement, a lot of news outlets and networks were talking about ‘BattleBots’ because it’s so unique and different,” recalls the senior vice president of corporate communication for Comedy Central. “We had high hopes before it hit the air. This is the kind of concept show that can break out in basic cable.” (The concept, as described by a deadpan co-anchor in an early episode: “These robots are going to beat the crap out of each other for our entertainment pleasure.”)

And break out it did. “It was just a matter of hours [after the first show aired in August] before we committed to the next 13,” Fox says.

The format of this Media Age mecha-sport has a familiar feel. Co-anchors do the play-by-play from a booth (“Like a beaver on speed!” one exulted after a whirling robot named Ziggo chewed through another bot’s wooden arm), while Bill Nye “The Science Guy” appears on camera during weigh-ins to offer “expert” commentary. Field reporters--two comedians and a babe from “Baywatch”--interview the victors and the vanquished in a solder-scented backstage pit area where damaged robots usually are restored in time for the robot-rumble finale that caps every BattleBots event.

Those routine redemptions give the commentators wide comic license. One, for example, chanted the Kaddish--the Hebrew prayer for the dead--as a battered robot was wheeled from the shrapnel-strewn arena. And spectators have been known to scream, “Dumpster! Dumpster!” during particularly grim exits. It’s all in good fun, so Comedy Central’s roving reporters encourage trash talk among the competing roboteers.

The first three weekly shows aired on Wednesdays beginning Aug. 30, and drew as many as 1.8 million viewers. The ratings instantly made “BattleBots” the network’s second-highest-rated series behind “South Park,” which it follows on the programming schedule. “By any measure, ‘BattleBots’ is a tremendous success in the 18- to 49-[year-old] demographic,” Fox says. “And I think the ‘BattleBots’ juggernauts have only just begun.”

Fox says the network has been inundated by callers from toy companies and other interested parties inquiring about BattleBots merchandising rights, though he wouldn’t name the companies involved. He also predicts that the shows will stimulate interest in robotic sports and attract additional competitors and major sponsors.

Hyperbole? Of course, and with good reason. A rival show produced in Britain and airing in Europe and some U.S. public-television markets has drawn a similarly enthusiastic response from both viewers and merchandisers. MTV is working on an Americanized pilot of that show with an eye toward a possible series.

Clearly, rock ‘em, sock ‘em robots are moving from the fringe subculture from which they sprang and into the mass market. “They’re spending millions!” Roski says of Comedy Central’s national ad campaigns. In July, the trade publication Electronic Media reported that the Television Critics Assn. placed “BattleBots” among the year’s most original cable launches--a significant accomplishment in a 24-hour sports world teeming with new and often extreme alternatives.

Not everyone is thrilled. For some robot aficionados, the babe and comedians adulterate the sport. “I feel a lot of energy has been spent jumping on the entertainment level rather than the sports level,” says one early participant in robot mania, requesting anonymity. “In the short term there’s more heat, but it takes away from the integrity. If Monday Night Football came on like robot wrestling with all the hype, fans who look for authenticity overnight would turn away.”

Yet others love the notion of bringing robotic combat into America’s living rooms. The appeal is basic and universal, according to Marc Thorpe, who many consider a founding father of the robotic-sports movement. “You have to keep in mind [that] it’s a primal fascination and desire to see issues of life--survival and destruction--play out in a way where no one gets hurt. You can’t do that in boxing and other sports because people get hurt. There’s healthy and unhealthy violence. Healthy is hitting a baseball 400 feet with a bat. No problem. But ramming your helmet into somebody’s knee to hurt them isn’t good.”

Asked to apply the cathartic theory to BattleBots, Jo Ann M. Farver, an associate professor of psychology at USC, just laughed. The theory, popularized during the 1960s, has since fallen out of favor.

Although she hasn’t seen “BattleBots,” Farver, who studies the effects of community violence on inner-city children, thinks the technical aspects of the competition sound great. And even if “BattleBots” isn’t the pressure-release valve Roski imagines it to be, she says televised robotic violence probably won’t damage the cultural psyche.

“Someone will anthropomorphize these robots and criticize it, especially because of the FTC stuff lately,” she says. “But it’s like that news special that showed kids engaging in aggressive behavior after watching the Power Rangers. Well, yeah. They do. But it’s meant to be a joke. They’re just messing around. It’s aggressive-looking play, but everyone has a smile on their face.”

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THE NOTION OF GLADIATORS-BY-PROXY ISN’T NEW: baby boomers will recall the wild popularity of a toy called Rock’em Sock’em Robots. But Thorpe, an Industrial Light and Magic animatronics designer who’s now an artist, was the first to move the idea onto a larger stage. His annual Robot Wars competition debuted in the Bay Area in l994 and ran through l997.

During those years, robotic combat was primarily for the amusement of a small and creative group of robot enthusiasts. According to John Searles, co-creator of the now-notorious spinning robot “Blendo,” Robot Wars was a subculture of “bikers and Marilyn Manson punks who loved these robots.” He says “they were Goth to the bone. All black: black T-shirts, black combat pants, black leather jackets, all dark shades of Doc Martens, black nail polish and weird makeup.”

Among those hard-core roboteers, though, were hints of the sport’s broader appeal, including younger kids who loved the robots and came with their parents.

In 1998, litigation shut down Robot Wars. Thorpe was legally constrained from staging any robot activities in the U.S. by the partner he’d brought in for crucial financial backing, Steve Plotnicki, head of rap label Profile Records. But the idea flourished overseas. The British production of “Robot Wars” has been drawing large audiences in Europe since 1998, and public television stations have bought the rights to air the show in 40 U.S. markets, including KCET in Los Angeles. Laurel Lambert, the station’s director of advertising and promotion, says KCET intends to air “Robot Wars” during the upcoming holiday season.

Because the dispute stalled Robot Wars in this country, regular participants began suffering a case of combatus interruptus. So Greg Munson leapt at the chance when another robot enthusiast challenged his La Machine robot to a street fight “wherever.” But “where?” was the critical question. These machines can do serious damage outside a cage.

Munson’s challenger, Lowell Nelson of Quincy, Calif., had a robot named S.L.A.M., whose primary weapon was a rotating sewer pipe. Nelson had built his machine in 1997 in the aftermath of the Robot Wars shutdown, and he was anxious to test his creation.

Roski promised to find a suitable, safe site. They finally settled on a deserted patch under the 101 Freeway overpass at Novato, on the northern edge of Marin County. On one side was an embankment leading up to the underside of the road; on the other, an abandoned railway line. A crew from a local TV newsmagazine show was on hand to videotape the event.

History will record the outcome as a quick and stylish victory for Munson’s La Machine. But Nelson recalls something more significant about that day: “It was at that rumble that Trey told us his idea for BattleBots, and it kind of evolved from there.”

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ROSKI’S SUCCESS AS A FLEDGLING, IF OFFBEAT, ENTREPRENEUR APPARENTLY is the result of the rigorous tenacity he learned from his father, as well as the trials of his own difficult youth.

Roski and his two sisters were raised in the same Toluca Lake home in which their parents still reside. When he was 5, Roski, the close-knit family’s only son, was tested and found to have severe dyslexia. He was sent to a special school in Buffalo, N.Y., that his mother says “promised to take these kids to college. They didn’t treat the kids like they were stupid or lazy.”

Roski, an overweight child, was never excused from the rigors of learning or any other endeavor. Being a slacker was not tolerated in the Roski kids, whose multimillionaire father, a part-owner of the Lakers basketball team, the Kings hockey team and Staples Center, is a former Marine Corps colonel nicknamed “The General.”

In family lore, Trey was a genius demon. He was always taking things apart, including doorknobs and, during his grandmother’s funeral, her radio. His mother says high school tests later confirmed her son’s aptitude for tinkering. Sister Katrina recalls him as the all-around fix-the-stereo, install-the-electronics guy of the family--”and the funniest, most fun of all of us.”

He’s tenacious, too. Gayle Roski describes her son as “a bulldog: he gets ahold of things and never quits,” and his college career is a good example of that. It took Roski seven years, but he graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 1991 with a degree in finance. He says he never missed a class.

Even then, says former college roommate and now BattleBots umpire John Remar, Roski was fascinated with remote-controlled toys. He once set up an obstacle course in their apartment for his souped-up toy race car.

Roski had spent a lot of time in the company of two Northern California cousins, Munson and Gar Moss. The boys remained so close that Munson and Moss invited Roski to join their Impact Media Group--a graphics design firm--in 1995. They nurtured that company until six months ago, when they phased out its accounts and turned their full attention to BattleBots.

For Roski, the move north was a welcome stepping stone out of Los Angeles. “I had to get away,” he says. “[My father] has an empire, with giant footsteps to follow. My reading disability made me realize [that] I can’t do that. I don’t want to pretend to do things I can’t do.”

He eventually pursued his interest in fast-moving toys into the air, intending to start a business flying commercial helicopters. “His was a passion he was attempting to turn into a job,” Munson recalls.

Roski bought a helicopter in 1993 by cashing in a matured life insurance policy from his grandfather. He won his father’s approval by picking him up in Las Vegas in a rented chopper and flying him home. “That convinced him,” he recalls.

Unfortunately, his business never got off the ground. Roski crashed his helicopter near Napa in 1994 before he had a chance to make any money. His future in-laws were on board, and the copter crashed not far from the Petaluma home he now shares with his wife, Coleen. No one was hurt, and he says he’d like to buy another--”one with two motors, as many spare motors [as] I can get.” But in the meantime, Roski has turned his attention to another personal passion.

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IN THE HUGE PIT AREA BEHIND the BattleBox arena, the teams that build and operate the 75 participating robots are hard at work between their bouts. T-shirted tech heads in jeans or baggy pants and running shoes make repairs and adjustments, borrowing tools from one another and amending their robots until the last minute before they’re called into the BattleBox. They’re competing for more than $30,000 in money and prizes, plus a 15% cut of the take from Comedy Central and toy-licensing deals, not to mention the Golden Nut trophy--the Stanley Cup of robotic combat.

There are four divisions: lightweight, middleweight, heavyweight and superheavyweight--ranging from 25 to nearly 500 pounds. Bouts last for three minutes and involve an array of weaponry, including saws, hammers, drills and spikes. Forbidden is the use of electric stun guns, water, foams, adhesives, explosives, lasers, untethered projectiles or entangling devices such as fishing line. Some robots, such as the spiked and whirling Ziggo, simply spin at 2,000 rpm and dare others to attack.

The robots at Fort Mason are no less varied than their makers--engineers, garage mechanics and tinkerers of all kinds who often post combat records and report the latest design adjustments on their Web sites. The robots range from plain-looking metal boxes to more artful expressionistic creations. One regular participant looks, moves and strikes like a scorpion. Another, The Mauler, is painted in Basquiat-like graffiti. Grendel is green with a single eye painted on a long crooked neck of a weapon. The ChiaBot features a fake mop of veggie-like thatch on its housing from which a flower pops out charmingly after each match.

Bot names are an art form unto themselves, among them: “Toe Crusher,” “Vlad the Impaler,” “Killerhurtz,” “Das Bot,” “BioHazard,” “Ankle Biter,” “Deadblow,” “Disposable Hero,” “Diesector,” “Turtle Road Kill” and “Super Orbiting Force.”

Moving through the pit area, Roski pauses to help a competitor ready his disabled robot for competition--just one robot freak helping another. “BattleBots is an empowering experience for participants and an absolute thrilling experience for the spectators,” he says. “It’s sanctioned violence without anyone getting hurt whatsoever, except for the robots, of course. It’s violence even a mother could love.”

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THE FORT MASON COMPETITION ends well. The crowds for the four three-hour sessions are consistently large and enthusiastic. Comedy Central got plenty of good footage to edit and package for its television audience. Plans already are underway for the next competition, which will be held next month in Las Vegas to coincide with the annual Comdex computer-industry extravaganza. BattleBots will be cross-promoted with that event.

Relaxing a month later in the BattleBots offices in a converted railway car in San Francisco’s booming dot-com landscape, Roski says he is determined to take robotic combat “to the top, all the way.” He foresees big corporate sponsors (many robots already have small company sponsorship) and toys (Roski says “charismatic” robots copied as toys will allow their creators to “retire for life”). He sees robot leagues with TV matches for the robot teams who put in long hours and their own money to pursue their passion.

Momentum already is building, according to Tom Gutteridge, executive chairman of the Mentorn Group, which produces the rival “Robot Wars” shows in Europe. He says toy knockoffs of Robot Wars robots are selling briskly. He also is confident that Mentorn’s recent pilot for MTV will lead to a regular series, which would differ in format from “BattleBots” but tap into the same impulse that’s fueling interest in robotic combat.

Asked if American television has room for two robotic-combat shows, Gutteridge says: “I see no reason why not. It’s a big nation, and I’m sure Trey would agree with that.”

Thorpe and Searles have even grander visions of the future, especially for the robots themselves. While Roski added the super-heavyweight category to BattleBots last year, they predict even more gargantuan weight divisions-- 1,000 pounds and up--with the giant bots duking it out in front of TV cameras in the desert, where flying parts won’t threaten a flesh-and-blood audience.

Roski considers the possibilities. “The TV, the toys--it’s all just to make it easier for the folks who want to do this,” he says. “The bottom line to me is the kids and the education.”

Indeed, Roski says his home in Petaluma has been a magnet for neighborhood kids who hang out to watch him test his bots-in-progress. His neighbors recently complained about the deep gouges his killer machines left in the streets and sidewalks. So now he labors like some latter-day Santa inside his garage workshop. Those tinkerings, too, have been a steady draw for kids, according to his wife. More powerful, even, than the violent fare of video games or reality TV.