Giant fighting robots coming to Motorco, Durham’s new dystopian form of fun
Every second Saturday, a collection of otherwise sensible adults strap on robot costumes built from empty boxes and tin foil, swinging cardboard swords and plastic axes, bashing each other in a clumsy battle to the cheers of a beer-soaked mob.
These clanking gladiators form the Giant Robot Fight Club, roughly 30 fighters who gather in Durham armed with homemade techno-warfare and assumed cyborg identities: Killdozer, Jimmy Bottfett and Terrorbyte, whose suit comes equipped with its own fog machine.
As a form of entertainment, the GRFC either signals the coming apocalypse or offers an escape from it, depending on your worldview.
“I think it’s sort of chaos,” said “Hot Dog” Henley, its creator, who emcees each bout shirtless, sporting an eye patch and a Fu Manchu mustache. “It’s a necessary chaos. Everything is so ordered, entertainment-wise. It’s all sort of corporate. This is, you know, the dreams of a lunatic.”
Through any given bout, robot grapplers might clothesline their opponents with a cardboard arm, head-butt them with a spiked helmet or fling them into a spectator’s table. On a particularly raucous night, this very fate befell a robot nicknamed Seam Ripper, who landed so hard that her thimble-shaped helmet flew into the audience.
Normally, this mayhem takes place at Durham Common Market, which offers a circle of upper-level balcony seating that mimics the Roman Colosseum. But on Aug. 1, the giant robots move to a larger and more lawless arena at Motorco Music Hall, promising “an evening of dystopian sci-fi nonsense.”
As a recent transplant from New York, both an actor and stand-up comedian, “Hot Dog” Henley surveyed Durham with an eye for what was missing and decided that the only satisfying form of entertainment had to not only serve the hunger for raw, unfiltered action but also involve a healthy bit of arts and crafts.
“I saw a lot of crafting sort of events, like drink and draws and pottery things,” he said, “and then a lot of role-playing events, like Dungeons and Dragons and crafting nights at bars. I thought, How can I kind of mix these things into one thing?”
He aimed for creating an atmosphere of post-civilization hellscape where it made sense for robots to fight on principle, what he now calls a “Mad Max-y vibe.”
“It’s just really funny,” he said. “Big clunky things trying to fight is deeply entertaining.”
It is hard to argue that machines that inflict pain fit nicely into the 2025 zeitgeist — a world where robots write term papers, drive cars and consume jobs of human beings.
The whole point of this tilt toward AI was to relax and watch the machines do all the work, wasn’t it? So GRFC follows the trend to its logical conclusion, and we humans can fantasize while we sip an IPA and watch the world we created collapse into tiny metal pieces.
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This story was originally published July 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.