In the early hours of this morning, there was a whole lot of metal-on-metal action when the Giant Robot Duel finally went down.

You might have diarised the date after we first made you aware of the battle – here – but if you weren’t all that eager for a 4AM wake-up call, the battle’s “live-stream” is available.

And if you forgot the background, here’s a little reminder from The Verge:

All the way back in July 2015 a US team of engineers (MegaBots Inc.) challenged their Japanese rivals (Suidobashi Heavy Industry) to a fight, but the difficulty in finding a venue and upgrading the robots has delayed the bout.

Held in an abandoned steel mill in Japan without any spectators, this is what went down.

The first round goes down at around eight minutes, the second duel around 13 minutes, and another just shy of 20 minutes:

Robot Wars might be all grown up, but I found that kind of disappointing. Pity.

Over email, MegaBots’ Gui Cavalcanti explained how the battled worked:

[T]he duel was fought on a knockout system, with no point scoring involved. Victory is attained by either knocking over or disabling your opponent (or, if they surrender), with the weight, power, size, and weapons of the bots “left to each individual team.”

Cavalcanti added, though, that the weapons were chosen “to not cut through metal, but instead to damage it.”

Boring.

[In case you didn’t watch, the winner was MegaBots, the American team. Didn’t think it would go that way, hey.]

[source:theverge]