A Brief History (by Brad Schick)

Robot Battle was inspired by a game called RobotWar on the Apple II+. I played this game a lot when I was in grade school and wanted something like it for Windows. This is a screenshot of RobotWar running on my Win2k machine in an Apple IIe emulator.

I also wanted to learn Windows development, so Robot Battle was started as a Windows 3.0 program in 1992. I was originally planning to keep Robot Battle for my own private use. In early 1994 I showed it to a few friends who suggested I release it as shareware.

After several more months of work, Robot Battle 1.2 was released to the public as shareware (I can not remember how I came up with 1.2). It was distributed through AOL, CompuServe, disk catalogs, and a few ftp sites.

I think it was about 11 months later that I released an update called 1.3 with a few fixes and new features. This release (sometime in 1995) was the last real feature change until 2001. At some point I released 1.31 to fix a bug that allowed robots to cheat by firing with large energy values, but no features were added.

Since my work on RB was going so slowly, I decided to ask some players to help with the game's development. I shared the code with a few people but it was still not publicly available. David Finch used the source code to implement a few highly requested tournament features and fix some small problems. He actually made a few releases, but I think most people used 1.33. I believe 1.33 was released sometime in 1997. I personally was spending almost no time working on Robot Battle.

It was slow going for a while, but in early 1998 I started to work on version 1.4 and made some good progress. The game was put on hold again when I started dating my wife to be. A few years and one major job change later, I found the time to work on RB once again.

In February, 2001 I finally released a new versions called 1.4. Version 1.4 was a major advancement with many new features and greatly improved speed. Version 1.4 runs games almost 30 times faster than pervious versions. Actually, the February release was only a test version since many of the planned features for 1.4 were not complete yet, but it was publicly available. With this release of Robot Battle I also shared all of the source code to the game.

While slowly working on Robot Battle 1.4, I joined a game development and publishing site called GarageGames. I joined GarageGames looking for 3D technology that I might use in another game project. I uploaded my profile, and was surprised to be contacted by the GarageGames cofounder Jeff Tunnell. Jeff asked if I would be interested in selling Robot Battle through GarageGames when they launched their game publishing site. GarageGames is built around the concept of "indy" games, and Jeff felt that Robot Battle was an excellent example.

As an independent developer, I liked the GarageGames concept and was thrilled to have a real distributor for Robot Battle. In mid 2001, I agreed to sell Robot Battle 1.4 through GarageGames. The GarageGames publishing site experienced several delays, but finally went live in December 2002. Robot Battle was one of only 3 games initially for sale. Please feel free to purchase your very own copy!

It has always amazed me how many people still enjoy playing Robot Battle after all these years. Thanks to everyone who has been involved. I plan to continue working on Robot Battle as long as there are still cool people playing. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt if those cool people purchased a copy from GarageGames :)