The BattleTech franchise celebrates its 40th birthday this year, and if that name doesn’t mean anything to you, then you probably are not a fan of bloody great giant robots, dice-rolling and crossing off little boxes with a pencil – but of course for me, back in my mid-teens as a nerdy mecha-head with an abiding love for wargames, it was catnip.
I first encountered this game of future warfare thanks to a friend who grabbed the 1st edition box set (then branded as BattleDroids) and dragged a bunch of us into a four-way robot fight. I loved it: set in the fictional far future of the Inner Sphere, the game features the dictators, monarchs and warlords of powerful noble houses ruling star-spanning empires, making and breaking alliances while fighting brushfire wars for dominance with BattleMechs, huge and heavily beweaponed bipedal war machines. It’s Game of Thrones with the machines from Pacific Rim instead of dragons.
I jumped on with the 2nd edition BattleTech: A Game of Armored Combat (renamed after legal shenanigans brought by George Lucas over the use of the word “droid”); indulging my enthusiasm for fighter craft, I also bought the AeroTech box-set and the first in what would be the vanguard of a massive range of tie-in fiction, William H. Keith’s novel Decision at Thunder Rift. Later I’d play in the digital version of this universe with the MechWarrior and MechCommander videogames, and even fight in an “actual” BattleMech cockpit at a Virtual World game centre.
BattleTech the tabletop game and BattleTech the fiction are still both going strong to this day, and along the way there have been board games, roleplaying games, card games, books, comics, an animated television series and enough tiny robot figures to fill a dropship. It’s a testament to the strength of the core concept that its had such longevity, and a big part of that is that the lore of the BattleTech world has been constantly growing and evolving over four decades, alongside its ruleset, which recently relaunched in a beginner-friendly 40th Anniversary edition.
I contributed a little bit to the BattleTech world back in 2008, writing “Straw Man”, a short story for the BattleCorps website set in the game’s signature Succession Wars era – sadly that fiction has vanished into the void for now, but I’m hoping that someday soon the current custodians of the franchise will unearth and reprint it, as I’d love to see my small contribution to this huge saga back out where fans could read it.
But until then; load those SRMs, clean the sweat-stains off your neuro-helmet, get your dice and a #2 pencil. There’s always a mech-fight happening somewhere.
