The game's popularity spawned several variants and expansions to the core system, including CityTech which fleshed out urban operations, infantry, and vehicle combat, AeroTech which focused on air and space-based operations, and BattleSpace which detailed large spacecraft combat. Catalyst Game Labs has continued this practice. When Fantasy Productions licensed the property, these 'Unseen' images were expanded to include all art produced 'out-of-house' – that is, whose copyrights resided with the creators, not the company. This led them to be termed by fans as 'the Unseen'. The anime-sourced BattleMechs continued to be referenced in-universe, but their images were no longer seen in new sourcebooks. Following the suit, FASA made the decision to use only images that they owned in future products. FASA realized that the use of licensed images made them vulnerable to lawsuits and worried that such a suit would bankrupt the company. Although Playmates was ordered to stop using the images in question, FASA received no financial compensation. Bills explained that FASA had sued Playmates over the use of images owned by FASA. In 2007, Classic BattleTech line developer Randall N. In later years, FASA abandoned these images as a result of a lawsuit brought against them by Playmates Toys and Harmony Gold over the use of said images. The rights to these images were licensed from Twentieth Century Imports (TCI). Rather than create their own original robot art, FASA decided to use already-extant designs that had originally been created for a variety of different Japanese anime, including Dougram, Crusher Joe, and Macross. Fourth edition: two rule-books, a booklet of record sheets, 48 stand-up playing pieces, and a sheet of 144 insignia stickers.Third edition: two color maps, a pack of record sheets, and fourteen 2' plastic miniatures of various BattleMech war machines.First edition: two full-color terrain maps, 48 stand-up BattleMech counters, four sheets of playing markers, plastic counter stands, dice, and a rule book.The name of the game was changed to BattleTech in the second edition because George Lucas and Lucasfilm claimed the rights to the term ' droid' the machines themselves were renamed BattleMechs from the second edition onward. The game was at first called BattleDroids. Interstellar and civil wars, planetary battles, factionalization and infighting, as well as institutionalized combat in the shape of arena contests and duelling, form the grist of both novelized fiction and game backstories.įurther information: List of BattleTech games Conception Ĭhicago-based FASA Corporation's original 1984 game focused on enormous robotic, semi-humanoid battle machines battling in a science-fiction feudalistic Dark Age setting. Cultural, political and social conventions vary considerably between worlds, but feudalism is widespread, with many states ruled by hereditary lords and other nobility, below which are numerous social classes.Ībove all, the central theme of BattleTech is conflict, consistent with the franchise's wargaming core. Individual lifestyles remain largely unchanged from those of modern times, due in part to stretches of protracted interplanetary warfare during which technological progress slowed or even reversed.

Generally, BattleTech assumes that its history is identical to real-world history up until approximately 1984, when the reported histories begin to diverge in particular, the game designers did not foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, which plays a major role past 1990 in the fictional BattleTech history.

Main article: BattleTech (fictional setting)Ī detailed timeline stretching from the late 20th century to the mid-32nd describes humanity's technological, social and political development and spread through space both in broad historical terms and through accounts of the lives of individuals who experienced and shaped that history, with an emphasis on (initially) the year 3025 and creating an ongoing storyline from there.

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