Robot Battle

Robot Battle was a programming game in which players used RSL (Robot Scripting language) to create robots which they then used to battle other player’s creations on-line. A fee was charged for entry into these contests, early contests cost $10 to enter but this was reduced to $5 in 1995.

The game was developed and released by Brad Schick in 1994 and at that time the robots were 2D and were viewed top down. It went through many upgrades and versions before being sold to GarageGames in 2004. There is a story behind the game which sees robot fighting become legal in the year 4000. As a newly graduated programmer you have been asked to build a fighting robot to represent the Vega system in the Intergalactic Robot Battle Contest. Succeed and you may never have to work again, fail and “you'll probably end up writing new versions of Vega Calculator in some half-forgotten VegaSoft building on one of the twenty moons of Vega Panet.”

Robot Battle (version 1.2) of the software came with these pre-configured robots Corners, Events, Fire, Rammer, Shell, Side and Target. The scripting for each could be viewed and used as the basis for new designs which could then be tested in a local battle and/or be swapped with other members of the community. It came with three .exe files;* winrob.exe: This is the main game and is used to set up local battles between robots

• distrib.exe: Is a program that scrambles a robots code, this is used when swapping robots with other members of the Robot Battle community. Robots scrambled by this process could not be entered into contests, 'plain' code had to be used for that..
• contest.exe: Used to submit player details, robots, and make payments when entering competitions.