The highly anticipated first giant robot battle will be available to watch next week, in the culmination of a mechanical fight that has been in the works for two years.
Fans of films such Pacific Rim and anime such as Gundam will finally see real-life giant robots slug it out, as teams from the United States and Japan duke it out to see who has the superior machines.
Watch The Giant Robot Battle On Oct. 17
In June 2015, United States-based MegaBots challenged Japanese firm Suidobashi Heavy Industries to the ultimate robot battle. Less than a week later, Suidobashi accepted MegaBots' challenge, and the giant robot duel was on.
The fight between the massive machines, however, took a long time to set up. In addition to the difficulty of finding a suitable venue for the clash of the titanic robots, both teams needed to tinker with their fighters as Suidobashi requested melee combat for the battle.
The giant robot battle can be watched on Twitch starting Oct. 17 at 7:00 p.m. PT. The fight will not be a live event though, as MegaBots revealed that it consisted of multiple rounds spread over several days to give the teams time to make repairs on their robots in between.
The duel happened in Japan, fittingly in an abandoned steel mill, with commentary coming from Bellator MMA's Mike Goldberg for the action and robotics expert Saura Naderi for the technicalities. The matches did not use a point system but rather awarded victory to the robot who knocks over or disables the opponent. All the aspects of the robots were left to the imagination of the teams, though Megabots and Suidobashi agreed to use weapons that will not slice through metal but rather just damage it.
There were no spectators for the event beyond the two teams, so it seems that we will only find out who won between the United States and Japan next week.
Meet The Fighters: USA vs Japan
MegaBots unleashed its Eagle Prime robot, which stands 16 feet tall and weighs 12 tons. Suidobashi, on the other side of the ring, rolled out its Kuratas, which has a height of 13 feet and a weight of 6.5 tons. The robots were piloted from the inside by Matt Oehrlein and Gui Cavalcanti for MegaBots and Kogoro Kurata for Suidobashi, the founders of their respective companies.
The robots, however, are pretty slow, which means that the fight will not be as fast-paced as what can be seen in movies and cartoons. The giant robot battle will still likely be a great thing to watch, though, even just for the sheer insanity of it.
