Games (competition)

"Gladiators will fight! Prisoners will die! And you will be distracted from our brutal, oppressive regime until Monday!"

The Games,^[1] alternately known as the "State Games",^[2] were an inter-city state gladiatorial competition held on Cybertron in the days before the Great War began, building on a long tradition of such combat in a futile attempt to engender peace between the states. The combat is intended to be ritualised, with points given for form and technique, but some combatants choose to ignore this in front of supportive home crowds.

Fiction

Marvel The Transformers comics

The Games were created by the last Overlord, in an attempt to use his waning influence to foster a spirit of friendly competition between city states that were on a seemingly-inevitable course to war over failing resources. While the competition itself caught on, if anything it served to aggravate existing tensions, particularly between Iacon and Tarn.

Held in various locations, including the Jekka Amphitheatre in Tyrest where they were called the "State Games" Deadly Games!, the final Games took place in Tarn, where Megatron, ignoring the spirit of the competition, savagely beat the Iaconian Sunstreaker until his compatriot Optimus Prime distracted Megatron on the verge of a death-blow. Faced with a savage assault from Megatron, Optimus pulled a pistol, until the Overlord called for fighting to cease.

Meanwhile, a group of Vos saboteurs, led by Tornado, were spotted by a second engineer sabotaging Tarn's power plant–which was staffed by only a skeleton crew during the Games–in an attempt to create a war between Tarn and Iacon, weakening both states. The engineer's warning and the subsequent explosion's destruction of a large part of Tarn, however, led to war between Vos and Tarn instead, putting an end to the Games for good. State Games

Aligned novels

The State Games, "the focus of Cybertronian sporting greatness", were given permanently to Tarn as part of a distribution of prestigious events and institutions in an attempt to pacify the city states. Exodus

Beast Wars: Uprising

"Also: Bread, circuses!"

When the Autobots and Decepticons grew too decrepit to continue the Great War, the Builders constructed the Maximals and Predacons to carry on the ancient conflict, a conflict that soon gave way to the rigidly structured Games. While the Games encompassed a variety of different sports, gladiatorial combat between teams was always a favourite, a tradition inspired by ancient Earth media. These matches took place in the ruins of the old Cybertronian cities, gutted and repurposed into arenas filled with various deadly hazards. Broken Windshields

Any Maximal or Predacon could be called to fight in the Games, and were selected by lottery. Not All Megatrons Those who chose to serve in the Maximal Command Security Force or Predacon Secret Police were granted immunity from the Games, which made them a popular career choice in spite of the low pay. Broken Windshields 'Bots who had broken the law were often sent to the Games as punishment. Identity Politics

Lio Convoy, the Maximal Guardian of Order, oversaw these matches from behind the scenes, rigging the results so that they would never end–and the Builders would never run out of amusement. But on the plus side, anyone who survived a match got a reward of a double energon bonus and the grant to travel from city to city. Of course, the Builders being as petty as they were would occasionally stage a Cull, wherein the survivors of previous games got called back to fight and die again. Culls were usually four years apart, and a source of great discontent from Maximals and Predacons, who felt it wasn't fair to drag 'bots who'd already fought for their lives back into the arena. Broken Windshields

At the time Blackarachnia, Nightscream and Immorticon fled Cybertron, the Games were held at a frequency of just over twice an orbital cycle. Broken Windshields

The Games were so important to the Builders that even after Grand Uprising began, the Games continued on among the loyalist Maximals and Predacons. On one occasion, the Builders even went as far as to use prisoners of war as combatants. The arena was the target of terrorist attack by Grimlock, who sought to unleash the G-Virus on the Builders in the crowd, though he was prevented from doing so by Hot Rod and Snapper. Micro-Aggressions Between Resistance attacks on the Games and an increasingly desperate war effort, the Games were soon called off. Derailment

Six stellar cycles into the Uprising, the Resistance began staging their own version of the Games as a way to maintain morale among the increasingly disaffected troops. Micromaster prisoners were forced to fight in arenas which had been filled with ancient Earth paraphernalia and crude facsimiles of Earth landmarks, ostensibly to memorialize the battles on Earth during the Great War. This ultimately backfired on them, as the Micromaster POWs had been infected with a combat upgrade that transformed them into mindless Vehicons, spreading the infection behind friendly lines. Safe Spaces

At the end of the Grand Uprising, the warlord Shokaract staged one last Game in the Hyperious Arena to determine who would represent his city in the new Cybertronian Parliament. Unlike the Games that had gone before, this battle was not fought to the death: Antagony defeated Cataclysm, secured his tail as a trophy, and won the right to represent her city of Hyperious. Derailment

Notes

• In "State Games", the competition was simply called "the Games",^[1] with the story's title referring to the political games that took place around them. They were called the "State Games" in "Deadly Games!" and Transformers: Exodus in reference to their originating story.

References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} "State Games": "In order to promote good will, the Overlord had used his still considerable influence to organize an inter-state competition. However the Games, as the competition became known, had if anything widened the deadly rift between the city states, particularly Iacon and Tarn."
2. ↑ Exodus: "The cities of Tarn and Vos, south of Kaon, have been troublesome for as long as they have existed. [...] Previous leadership, during the relative peace and bonhomie of the Golden Age, gave each city something to pacify it. Tarn was made the location of the State Games, the focus of Cybertronian sporting greatness;..."