The fighters at the Interactive Combat League are more than nine feet tall, wear suits of steel and shoot exploding projectiles toward each other.
Timothy Chen Allen
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Timothy Chen Allen
In the back of a church in an anonymous stretch of 7 Mile in Detroit dotted with industrial lots and fast food stores, performers dressed as giant robots battle it out in front of a live audience behind bullet-proof glass.
“We have these nine foot tall metal gladiators that shoot exploding projectiles at 20 rounds a second,” says Art Cartwright, the impresario who founded both the church, Global Empowerment Ministries, and the organization behind the robot show, The Interactive Combat League.
The show, running every few months, is called Robowar. Cartwright’s two enterprises have little to do with each other, he says, save for sharing space and introducing members of his community to potential employment in robotics.
“Metropolitan Detroit right now leads the nation in robotics,” Cartwright says. “We have more robots than any other place in America.”
But the gleaming, glowing-eyed stars of the Interactive Combat League are nothing like industrial robots that help assemble automobiles. They are played by humans wearing what might be considered mech suits. Robots fighting each other as entertainment is a cultural fantasy that goes back at least to 1956, when Richard Matheson’s short story “Steel” was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was adapted into a 1963 episode on the TV show The Twilight Zone, and helped inspire the 2011 movie, Real Steel.
“I’m a Marvel fan,” Cartwright says. “So I’m like, okay, let’s make some robots that look like superheroes.”
Robowar has been selling out shows in its 572 seat auditorium since it launched last summer, and has attracted admiring national coverage. Tickets start at around $50. Cartwright says he eventually plans to stage online interactive robot fights where remote viewers control the action by buying virtual tokens. He says he’s created AI personas for robots representing 30 different cities, from Boston to Los Angeles.
“They talk cash money trash,” he chuckles.
