The following is an e-mail sent to the Robot Competitors on 4/27/99:

Posted: 4/27/99


From-Robot Wars
To- All

When we announced that Robot Wars LLC had settled its dispute with Marc Thorpe on March 5, 1999, we were excited to be able to put everything behind us. We thought that we would finally be in a position to make Robot Wars a huge success on a worldwide basis. Unfortunately, our celebration was quickly interrupted by the unexpected announcement that the same individuals who had unsuccessfully tried to take control of Robot Wars had scheduled an event called BattleBots in order to interfere with Robot Wars and to cause Robot Wars enormous economic harm.

When it became clear that we would not be able to work out this new problem because BattleBots would not voluntarily move to a date that did not conflict with Robot Wars, we found ourselves once again forced to resort to litigation in order to protect our rights. We have worked too hard to achieve this settlement to let Robot Wars be destroyed now.

We are interested in encouraging robotic combat and nothing would be better than if competitions were able to occur with greater frequency and on a regular basis. It would be to everyone's benefit if more people built robots and a larger audience were able to watch them compete. But BattleBots seems more intent on destroying Robot Wars than entering the business in a way that might be beneficial to you or to robotic combat in general.

As a general rule, our policy has been to keep the robotic community out of this type of commercial dispute. However, if you want more information about the lawsuit please contact us. We do not believe that you will be inconvenienced by this development.

As always we are available to answer your questions by phone, fax or e-mail.