Aghhhh, I really don't know what it is. I was hoping for some personal service in being introduced to whatever it is. Xoxoxo
Battletech started life as a
tabletop miniatures board game, published in the mid 1980's, about 31st century warfare featuring piloted giant robots called Battlemechs. Additional rule sets fleshed out ground combat (adding tanks and infantry to the mix) and atmospheric and space combat.
The Battletech Universe was fully fleshed out via a series of rather
generous sourcebooks detailing the history and culture of each of the Successor states in the Inner Sphere (roughly analagous to the Bubble in Elite: Dangerous), the Periphery (minor states at the edge of "civilized" space), and Comstar (techno-pagans who ran the FTL network), along with several technical manuals depicting Battlemechs, ground vehicles, aerospace fighters, and space ships. At the same time, several novels began to be published, depicting important events in the Battletech Universe's time line.
Additional source books fleshed out the tabletop board game into a full fledged pen-and-paper RPG. More novels were published. Soon after came the video games: roleplaying games like the Cresent Hawk's inception, the Mechwarrior series of video games, and even arcades featuring full sized Battlemech simulator pods (
some of which are still operational today). There was even an animated TV series and, IIRC, talk of a movie.
It all came crashing down when Harmony Gold (the company behind the Robotech, who are also responsible for blocking later Macross series from being imported into the United States) sued FASA (the company behind Battletech) for copyright infringement... despite the fact that FASA had legally licensed some of their Battlemech designs from the Japanese creators of Macross and similar anime series from around the same time.
The game still survives today, both in board game form thanks to Catalyst Games Labs, and of course numerous video games.
