BattleTech: The Giant Robot Game That Had to Hide Its Own Mechs

BattleTech, MechWarrior, Warhammer 40K, Robotech, Macross, FASA, Jordan Weisman, Shadowrun and the legend of the Unseen all come together in this deep dive into the real story of BattleTech. In 1984, a tiny Chicago company built a giant robot war game on mech designs borrowed from Japanese anime. It grew into novels, arcade cockpit pods, a cartoon and the MechWarrior games. Then the borrowed designs caught up with it, and BattleTech was forced to stop showing some of its most famous machines in its own books. Fans called them the Unseen. This video tells the story of how BattleDroids became BattleTech, how the Clan Invasion and MechWarrior 2 turned it into a phenomenon, how a lawsuit erased its icons, how FASA switched itself off in 2001, and how creator Jordan Weisman kept dragging his game back to life, all the way to a Kickstarter, a new video game and a courtroom. Whether you shaded armor circles on a record sheet in the eighties or you're discovering the Inner Sphere for the first time, this is the story of the mech game that refused to power down. #battletech #gamingdocumentary #gaminghistory