Voltron fans better start saving up, as a once-in-a-lifetime product is hitting the market. MegaBots, the company that builds incredible battle robots and other mechanical monsters for live-action sporting events, is auctioning off one of their creations on eBay, per SyFy . That said, the price tag is pretty hefty, coming in at nearly $180,000 at present.
MegaBots was co-founded in 2014 by Gui Cavalcanti, Matt Oehrlein, and Andrew Stroup in the hopes that they could create an international robot fighting sports league. The first step was creating a robot duel between the United States and Japan, which aired in October 2017 on Amazon’s TwitchTV.
MegaBots beat their Far Eastern counterparts Suidobashi in two rounds, and the video has since been watched over 8 million times. It also won a Guinness World Record in the category of “Largest Robots to Fight.”
The current battle robot, named Eagle Prime, was specifically built for this match up, and thus has a number of astonishing battle abilities. Taking a year and a half to build to the tune of $2.5 million, it is touted by the founders as the most combat-capable robot in the world. It is powered by a Corvette engine and has room for two pilots to take control. When standing up, it measures 16 feet tall.
In addition to Eagle Prime itself, MegaBots will send the winning bidder a shipping container full of spare parts, like radiator fans, filters, and fuses. However, sure to appeal to its audience, the shipping container also contains a number of weapons attachments, including a giant drill attachment, a set of 500-pound steel knives, and a 6-inch double-barreled pneumatic cannon.
In a video on Eagle Prime, co-founder Matt Oehrlein mentioned other details, including the potential earnings from owning such a robot. This ranged from backyard demonstrations to renting out the machine for trade shows and other special events.
The company says that it is selling Eagle Prime because they have run out of money and are hoping to move the company to pursue a new direction. Bidding originally started at $1, though it now nears $200,000.
Though the company is ready to move on, the creative engineer and another co-founder of MegaBots, Gui Cavalcanti, still expressed enthusiasm about the inspiration and history with the battle robot.
“We were probably mostly inspired by the MechWarrior series of video games, and the BattleTech universe those videos games are based on,” said Cavalcanti.
“But it’s not modeled after any particular character specifically.”
In other futuristic news, a robot just passed its pilot test, paving the way for unmanned airplanes, per The Inquisitr .