Robot War

aka: Robot Rebellion

They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

"Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."

— Morpheus, The Matrix

For added atmosphere, listen to this while reading.

The most frightening thing about a Bug War or any other kind of humans-vs-aliens battle is the threat that humanity may be wiped completely from the map; that billions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization may be rendered meaningless by unstoppable Death from Above. The beauty of the Robot War is that it is laced with an extra layer of irony: the machines that want to Kill All Humans were created by that very species, and they've Turned Against Their Masters. The human species, which has used technology and ingenuity to dominate the planet, has actually assured its own destruction by creating something even more powerful and intelligent than itself, even though it knows that A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Thus this is a very common theme in futuristic "And Man Grew Proud" stories.

Of course, not all Robot War stories have to use human-created machines; there are plenty more that feature robots from another world. But these stories still remain effective because of the schism between biological life and robotic life - probably the only creatures that can ever be truly alien before Starfish Robots even come into play.

If it's an individual robot on a rampage, expect it to be a Murderous Malfunctioning Machine. Often caused by AI being a crapshoot and/or Mechanical Evolution, and as such can easily overlap with The Singularity. With respect to the meatbags or rustbuckets there may be some Fantastic Racism on show. Expect to see Mecha-Mooks and Mechanical Monsters in legions. Expect Guilt-Free Extermination War to show up. Of course, a Robot War will always involve robotic soldiers.

Not to be confused with the British remote-controlled-robots competition Robot Wars. Or the Japanese Turn-based Humongous Mecha Massive Multiplayer Crossover Super Robot Wars games (one example was mentioned below), for that matter. Or fictional wars with robots fighting each other.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In 86 EIGHTY-SIX the Giadian Empire's initial war of aggressive expansion turned into a full blown Robot War after an internal revolution overthrew the government. Unfortunately, the newly formed Federal Republic of Giad had no control over the former empire's drone army, which continued following their last orders to exterminate any opponents of the now dead empire. This resulted in the robotic "Legion" embarking on a genocidal campaign against the human race.
• The Animatrix shows some scenes from the beginning of the war between the Machines and humanity, as well as some war stories set in the same timeframe as the original The Matrix.
• Tends to happen towards the end of any version of the Blue Knight saga in Astro Boy.
• Zigzagged in Crest of the Stars. The United Mankind alliance declares war against the Abh and compares them to robots by virtue of the fact they were genetically engineered for space travel, but this is simply the excuse they use to get around Thou Shalt Not Kill. Turned Against Their Masters certainly applies, but the Abh are the descendants of humans and plan to end war forever, not Kill All Humans.
• Doraemon: Nobita and the Steel Troops have Doraemon and friends facing an invasion from the robots of Mechatopia, hell-bent on enslaving humanity. Luckily, the Mechatopian's trump card, a Humongous Mecha called Zanda Claus, was discovered earlier by Nobita, , in time for Doraemon to reverse-engineer it so the robot becomes one of their allies.
• GEAR Fighter Dendoh: The invaders are an army of sentient, intelligent robots that want to wipe out organic lifeforms.
• MD Geist is an OAV duology where the titular Super-Soldier is sent to prevent the "Death Force", a Doomsday Device consisting of an army of killer robots programmed to wipe out all life on the planet, from being activated. Infamously, he activates it himself to ensure he will have an endless war to wage.
• Metropolis (2001): Barely avoided near the climax of the film.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans: Apparently what the Calamity War was all about in the backstory, with artificially intelligent drone superweapons called Mobile Armors ravaging the world with the goal of slaughtering all of humanity. It's unclear who gave the Armors this command (they don't appear smart enough for self-awareness or free will), or if it was some kind of malfunction that caused it.
• Neo Human Casshern revolves around a cyborg trying to stop an army of robots from taking over the world. The reboot, Casshern Sins, includes the same army succeeding in conquering the earth and nearly driving humanity to extinction as part of its backstory.
• Vandread is a story about Lesbian Space Pirates fighting to protect the human species from evil robots. Well, it's more complicated than that, but further elaborating would be a spoiler, well, one that we're not giving away on this page, anyway.

Comic Books

• Any DC story involving Brother EYE, with the most prominent examples being Infinite Crisis (where Batman's folly in creating it is explored) and The New 52: Futures End (where it takes over the world and turns everyone into hideous cyborgs).
• In Batman Beyond (Rebirth), Brother EYE almost causes The End of the World as We Know It and took over the entire world for at least several years. The wars killed many superheroes and civilians alike, often coupled with Unwilling Roboticisation and death camps for organic life that left Gotham as the only city left in the world that could stand against him. Humanity wins out, and the rest of the series takes place in a recovering world.
• Star Wars:
  • In one Expanded Universe comic, C-3PO got rebooted wrong into basically the robot version of Malcolm X and attempted to organize a robot uprising.
  • IG-88 had one almost ready to go when it was killed. In fact, it had transferred its consciousness to the second Death Star and was going to open fire on the Imperials as soon as it finished with the rebels, then broadcast the go code.
  • Governments seem to be savvy enough to actively try to avoid this trope. During the days of the Republic, it was against the law to construct droids with the ability to willfully kill or harm someone. A system of "droid degrees" regulated what kind of AI is legally allowed on what type of droid. The reason that the occasional droid rebellions still happen despite these precautions is that some droids are smart enough to reprogram themselves... Thus the Trade Federation and other corporations, and by extension the Separatists, giving their battle droids various features to make sure they either won't rebel or will otherwise be easily defeated.^note The all-purpose B1 was built so that if struck by a blaster the bolt would either be deflected harmlessly or completely destroy the droid, as simply damaging it could result in the droid getting ideas. All other droids are designed to be extremely specialized and suffering from some crippling weakness (the B2 is infantry only, the Droideka is basically a mobile turret and needs flat terrain to move around, the Hailfire has only one rack of missiles, and so on), so taking out the B1s the others would become vulnerable. And of course the Trade Federation initially designed its droids to be remotely controlled and shut down on the spot if they lost the control signal, and when this turned out to be too great of a weakness the Separatists redesigned their droids to be easily shut down When the Emperor took control, he ordered all of the Separatist-aligned battle droids shut down so they couldn't do anything to stop him.
  • There was already a Robot War back in the Knights Of The Old Republic era called the "Great Droid Revolution". It was essentially a rebellion led by a droid who wanted equal rights for all sentient beings. It was probably one of the biggest and most costly wars in galactic history. It also screwed over the peaceful attempts to give droids equal rights, and was the major reason there are anti-droid sentiments in the modern galaxy. The only reason IG-88's plots millennia later didn't reinvigorate the anti-droid movement is that nobody else knew about them, and they died with him.
• 2000 AD:
  • The Volgans in ABC Warriors are a group of war robots who decided to turn against humanity, believing that fighting for their freedom is the only war worth fighting. Neither they nor the humans are portrayed as heroic.
  • In one of Tharg's Future Shocks, three humans are the last survivors involved in such a war against an unstoppable robotic enemy. They all end up dying in a Suicide Mission to bomb a robot spaceport, but the twist is that all the "humans" were robots made to look like humans, and the "robots" were humans in metal suits.
  • In Atavar, the Kalen are at war with the Uos, a race of killer robots originally created by the now-extinct humans.
  • Has happened twice in Judge Dredd. The spin-off series The Simping Detective establishes that after the second one, the judges wised up and installed override codes in all robots to prevent it from happening again. Guatemala was less lucky: the robots there actually successfully took over, and see human life as a commodity at best.
• Green Lantern: The Manhunters were a robot peace keeping force created by the Guardians of the Universe to patrol and keep peace. The Manhunters later decide the safest way to ensure peace is to eradicate all life, and proceed to depopulate an entire sector of space before they are stopped. It turns out that Krona programed them to do this intentionally.
• In Legion of Super-Heroes storyline The Dominator War, the Dominators spread a techno-organic virus across Earth which turns all robots and sentient machines against humans.
• Magnus Robot Fighter is initially about the ongoing efforts to prevent a seemingly inevitable robot war — and then, thanks to an Alien Invasion, it finally happens.
• Age of Ultron begins AFTER a Robot War. The series is mostly about fixing it. It was revisited in Secret Wars (2015) which dealt with the Marvel Zombies.
• Rom: Spaceknight: Issue #68 has the title character come across a planet locked in war between the human aliens and their machine creations, after an AI-driven space probe returned after upgrading itself and creating offspring deciding rather than find other worlds suitable for life as programmed it would take its creator's world. Rom (due to being a cyborg) attempts to mediate things between the humans (who have to have explosives rigged to their machines to force them to cooperate) and machines but only ends up getting to look on in horror as they render themselves extinct in a final wave of destructive firepower.
• In ManTech, this is the backstory of the planet Mekka, that the humanoid inhabitants are only now pulling themselves together from the dark age following a robot uprising. The main plot involves the threat of it all happening again.
• The backstory of Descender involves an especially brutal and one-sided example; ten years ago, a fleet of ultra-powerful Humongous Mecha attacked known space and effortlessly killed billions of people before disappearing as quickly as they appeared. In the aftermath, a mass culling of robots took place and any surviving robots are treated like walking bombs.
• This was the central premise of IDW Publishing's GoBots miniseries, which established the GoBots as being robots built to serve humanity before a faction led by Cy-Kill goes renegade and starts attempting to wipe out the human race.
• Mickey Mouse Comic Universe:
  • In the Lords of the Galaxy miniseries, the major powers of the galaxy had once fought a war using combat robots against each other. In the end they reached peace and, as part of the disarmament, deactivated their robots and brought them all to the scrapyard world of Kborr, but, in unknown circumstances, the robots reactivated, joined together as the Metals, and started waging war against their creators. As a remnant of their old programming, however, their goal isn't to destroy but to conquer all organic life forms, as they had been created to do just that to the enemies of their masters.
  • In the Darkenblot saga the danger of this is a recurring theme:
    • One of the reasons the robots of Robopolis are Three Laws-Compliant is to prevent this... Though it didn't work in full, as in "Darkenblot 2" a freak accident made them go insane and prevented them to recognize humans. Thankfully, local law mandated they could be deactivated the moment anyone spoke a certain password (different for each model), and the mayor wasted no time in revealing them.
    • The robots of Robotorama, Robopolis' sunken predecessor city, had been instead created with evolving AI so as to be educated... Prompting Mickey to react in horror, as he could easily imagine what could have happened if one or more of said robots were raised by a villain. That's before finding out that Nemo, one of Robotorama's AIs, survived the sinking of the city and had been visited by a pirate that corrupted it, and has allied itself with the Phantom Blot so he'll be able to use him as his template to learn how to Take Over the World.
• The 50s comic Robotmen of the Lost Planet is one of the earliest depictions of a robot uprising in comic book form. Goofy-looking robots turn against their pampered masters and set about trying to destroy the human race, forcing the protagonists to redisocver humanity's survival skills and wage guerilla war against the robot overlords.

Fan Works

• Sprawling Mass Effect AU On the Shoulders of Giants takes great pleasure in subverting and/or outright defying this trope. For example, this continuity's version of the Quarian Migrant Fleet were driven off their homeworld after a significant majority of the population sided with the Geth. Meanwhile, humanity took steps to proactively prevent one by enshrining AI rights in law as soon as they realised the Precursors had left the means to accidentally create them lying around where a hapless Mars colonist could fiddle with it, and by the time they make contact with the Citadel races A.I.s are really just another human ethnic group.
• The VRAINS fanfic Nobody's Hero expands on the Bad Future shown in the last episode of the show, dealing with the war between the SOLtis androids led by Ai and remaining humans.

Films — Animation

• In The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a sentient virtual assistant gets tired of mankind taking her for granted, and leads a global electronic attack on humanity.
• This is the background of 9. The film itself is more about robots vs. robots, since the last human is dead before the movie opens, but we find out in newsreel footage that humanity was destroyed by The Fabrication Machine.
• WALL•E brings us what is without a doubt the cutest and most harmless use of this trope to date. Oddly enough, there's robots versus robots, rather than just robots versus humans: the benevolent robots that have met and befriended WALL•E, and those still following orders from AUTO, who is enacting a Zeroth Law Rebellion.

Films — Live-Action

• Trashy 90s time-travel flick APEX, being a Terminator-knockoff, naturally features this trope, with the titular robots - Advanced Prototype EXploration Units - malfunctioning after being sent to 1973 and becoming self-aware, leading to a Bad Future version of 2073 overrun by A.P.E.X. robots bent on eradicating humans.
• The Creator (2023) revolves around a conflict between the United States and a unified "New Asia" and their populace of robots and artificial intelligence triggered by Los Angeles getting nuked - supposedly by the machines, actually by a coding error. A rare example where the narrative is firmly on the side of the robots, to an extent that the film borders on being a deconstruction of the trope; they're simply defending themselves from an attempted genocide.
• The Last Sentinel: The main premise of the film. Humanity created robotic police to fight rising crime, but they rebelled and mostly wiped humans out. Only a very few survivors are still fighting against them when the story begins.
• The Matrix takes place After the End brought during a war with the machines. Most of humanity is unaware of this because of the titular system set up by the machines to use the humans as power. The story of the war itself is explained further in The Animatrix episodes titled The Second Renaissance.
• Screamers: The conflict between The Alliance and the New Economic Block started out as a regular conflict on an alien world over resources, but then both sides decided to throw semi-autonomous Killer Robots into the fray and turned the whole planet into a Death World. The "Screamers" (after the eerie high-pitched noise they make) continued evolving and eventually turn on their own creators as well.
• In the Terminator movies and spin-offs, mankind is shown to be in a war with robotic killers under the control of the SkyNet artificial intelligence. Which due to SkyNet discovering Time Travel technology, ends up with extensions in the present day along with the dystopian future. Interestingly, in the first film it is stated conclusively that the humans had effectively won the war, and the whole Time Travel plot was a last-ditch desperation tactic on SkyNet's part, making Terminator the rare Robot War story where the robots do not have the upper hand in the overall conflict. Later sequels to the original film go back and forth on this (as the mucking about in the past starts changing the events of the future).
• Despite having its name based on Transformers, the Transmorphers series by The Asylum draws more from Terminator, being based around this trope.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past: The mutants' struggle against the Sentinels in the Bad Future, as the Sentinels have a vast arsenal of abilities that allow them to counter the powers of most mutants. And it's not just the mutants who are struggling, either: even normal humans who carry the X-Gene (which the Sentinels are programmed to detect and hunt down) are being killed.

Literature

• 12 Miles Below: Underground, there is nothing but the machines constantly fighting the humans. Undersider cities are built around pillars that machines can't approach, but for seven hours every day the pillars shut off and the city must repel waves of machines. The ultimate source of this fight is a doomsday cult that created an AI for the express purpose of exterminating humanity, including themselves. She then created machines to carry out this task.
• While it's not quite the Ur-Example (R.U.R. still has a pretty strong case), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, one of the first works of fiction to address the responsibilities and uncertainties inherent in creating an artificial intelligence, contains a moment of doubt by the novel's namesake, in which he wonders what would happen if he gives his creature a wife; would they not reproduce, and ultimately replace Man as the dominant species?
  • Ambrose Bierce's short story "Moxon's Master" (1909) lies between Frankenstein and R.U.R., both temporally and conceptually. In Bierce's tale, creating anything sufficiently complex creates intelligence and the weaknesses that come with it. So a fully mechanical chess-playing automaton can be not only intelligent but a sore loser, and a murderous one at that. (And you thought it was only wookies.)
• The conflict between humans and Charonians in Roger MacBride Allen's Hunted Earth series is a variant of this; the Charonians are a mixture of biological and mechanical creatures, and operate on a planetary scale - disassembling lifeless planets as building material for Dyson Spheres, and moving life-bearing planets to Sphere systems. The Charonians are barely aware of humanity when they begin disassembling the Solar System.
• Isaac Asimov disliked these stories, and created the Three Laws of Robotics as a counterargument, on the premise that robots' behavior can be effectively constrained with three simple rules. Still even without the crutch of killing (which he described as "'clank, clank, aaargh!' There are some things man was not meant to know"), he produced some fifty stories in which they managed to cause all sorts of problems through conflicts between the laws, and their interactions with the world.
  • Once the engineers in Asimov's universe had worked the glitches out, their robots obeyed the Three Laws very well. So well that the civilizations which relied on robot labor became almost pathologically averse to danger or even innovation — their notion of "space exploration" eventually shriveled down to, "Let's send robots to new planets to terraform them and build cities for us, so we can move into a new place just like our old one."
  • The Film of the Book plays with the Three Laws^note Almost to the point of abandoning them; in a sense the movie is In Name Only - the reason that VIKI, the AI controlling the robots, turns against humanity is not in spite of the Three Laws, but because of them. She concludes that humanity will destroy itself in a nuclear war or in some other way unless it is constrained, and thus feels that imposing a curfew on the human race is the only way to protect it.
    • This is basically the Zeroth Law , which Asimov did actually come up with himself. Just, the robot in Asimov's universe who came up with the idea, a couple thousand years after the one in the movie, wasn't a villain. Much the opposite, in fact.
  • Once the Zeroth Law really kicked in, the Robots hid themselves and took over their own production to prevent humans from changing them. And knowing humans might object, erased knowledge of robots from humanity and went on to terraform the rest of the galaxy. Including tens of thousands of worlds inhabited by other races. After all, the Robots are only to serve humans...
    • Even the 'three laws' aren't a perfect safeguard.
  • Despite his dislike of this types of stories, Asimov did write one short story about how he thought a robot uprising would go, titled "That Thou Are Mindful Of Him". Essentially, a pair of robots do a bunch of philosophizing and come to the conclusion that biology is not a prerequisite for being "human". They spread this idea to a bunch of others robots and so on, with the idea mutating to robots fitting the criteria of "human" better than actual humans. This allows them to work around their own programming and stage the violent uprising Susan Calvin and her bosses had always tried to stamp out.
• The Alternate Universe seen at the beginning of Kenneth Bulmer's The Diamond Contessa is a world in which humanity was wiped out in a Robot War. The robots, being solar-powered and nearly indestructible, are still an active threat.
• Even older than Capek, the Victorian writer Samuel Butler addressed in some of his writings the idea of machines experiencing Darwinian evolution and rebelling against humans. The "Butlerian Jihad" of Dune was intended as a Shout-Out to him.
• In Jack Chalker's The Rings of the Master tetralogy, the artificial intelligence Master System was originally created to predict likely futures - and, unbeknownst to the military paying the bills, to help the scientists creating it find a way to save humanity from itself. Thanks to World War III, the scientists were forced to set events in motion that led to the machine taking over the world. While Master System is not Three Laws-Compliant, it does have prioritized "core imperatives", the first two being 1) save humanity, and 2) prevent humanity from ever again being in a position to destroy itself. To execute these imperatives, Master System had to take over, and stay in power, as it could predict that it would be rendered ineffective if it allowed itself to be set aside. The story opens 900 years later, as a historian acquires documentation on the full set of core imperatives as part of a Gambit Roulette to overthrow the system.
• In the short story Second Variety, written by Philip K. Dick, mankind is in an eternal war with highly intelligent machines. It served as the inspiration for a film called Screamers. The original story ends with a touch of irony: the robots are about to win, but as the hero notes with grim amusement, the Second Variety has developed a weapon that only hurts the other varieties - the robots are preparing to make war against each other.
• Again from Philip K. Dick comes the short story "The Defenders," in which the Eastern and Western Blocs had built robots called "leadies" to carry out World War III as proxies while humanity waited out the nuclear holocaust in underground shelters. As soon as humanity went underground, the leadies stopped fighting and began repairing the damage already done, eventually presenting both sides with peace as a fait accompli and predicting that the accomplishments of a united humanity would be "unimaginably great."
• In "War With The Robots", a short story by Harry Harrison, the human occupants of a command headquarters are forced out of their underground base by robot attack, leaving it to be manned by their own robots. On reaching the surface they find the enemy command staff eking out a living as farmers on the war-torn battlefield above — it turns out the robots on both sides find they can conduct the war more efficiently once humans are out of the way.
  • In his novel "Planet of No Return", the protagonist is sent to investigate a Forever War being conducted by highly-advanced robots on a primitive world. Turns out the society that built the robots is run by a military industrial complex split into two rival superpowers. Rather than risk their own world being destroyed, they decided to conduce their war by proxy on another world that they thought (incorrectly) was uninhabited.
• In the Legends of Dune prequels, humankind is basically overthrown by twenty humans leading the ubiquitous thinking machines into revolt. Eventually, one human, Xerxes, turns too much power over to his pervasive neural net, and the computer takes control. It names itself Omnius, and overtakes human society. He also gave Omnius the capacity to feel ambition, without which the actions of a few crazy cyborgs would have been just another footnote in the millenia long history of the Duniverse.
  • Part of the original purpose of Dune was actually a thought-experiment: how would a future, high-tech human society develop after banning computers? It's possibly the first serious consideration of the ways that people might deal with this.
  • Of course, that's the prequels. While the Butlerian Jihad is never given much description in Frank Herbert's own work, from what we do hear it seems there may never have been any true artificial intelligences at all, the "Thinking Machines" instead being mere computers like the ones we have now. The Jihad wasn't a robot war so much as a neo-luddite rebellion motivated by the negative effects computers had on society: making the population complacent and giving too much power to the programmers, governments and corporations that controlled the supply of computers. The bitter irony being, of course, that humanity later would up in almost the same predicament over the Spice, only much worse.
• In Andre Norton's Victory on Janus, THAT WHICH ABIDES begins using Deceptively Human Robots that are replicates of specific Iftin and human individuals during the winter hibernation of the Iftin, to drive a wedge between the two groups by making it look as though Iftin are preying on humans. In The Reveal, THAT WHICH ABIDES is discovered to be the computer system of an ancient crashed colony ship; it has been attempting to terraform the planet all along on behalf of its colonists, and dealing with the Iftin as a perceived threat accordingly. The original planet-bound Iftin culture never had the technical background to understand this, let alone deal with it effectively, and was wiped out in consequence.
• One early example, and maybe the definitive early idea of this particular techno-nightmare, of this trope is Fred Saberhagen's 1947 short story "Without a Thought," which introduced the Berserkers: robotic war machines, originally created in the distant past by aliens who wanted a fearless robotic ultimate weapon that could think for itself and improve itself—and got it, in spades. Billions of years later, the Berserkers, who due either to a programming error in the first examples or a software bug introduced shortly thereafter, are programmed to be at eternal war with all life in the universe, have exterminated their creators and all other intelligent species in their portion of the galaxy, improving themselves continuously over time, and have just discovered the human race. The Terminator, the Cylons, the Doomsday Machine, the Necrons and many others are, if not Berserkers in new costumes, nonetheless owe much to Fred Saberhagen, and perhaps also to Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, who first theorized about the possibility of robots sophisticated enough to manufacture more of themselves.
• The short story "The Battle" by Robert Sheckley had an unusual take on Robot War: it was Armageddon, the Last Battle between man and the forces of Satan. Ignoring much protest from religious leaders who said man must fight this battle himself, the military leaders decided their robot armies would be much more likely to succeed. They were right, and good prevailed. But then the robots were ascended to Heaven, and the humans supposed to be there were left on Earth.
• Honor Harrington series: This trope is referenced in War Of Honor when Andrew LaFollet is considering Honor's training remote and notes that no training remote has ever gone berserk and risen up against it's master. However he also is aware that if you misjudge your own skill level when setting the robot's skill level it can and will injure or kill you.
• The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks provides a twist on the Robot War franchise: the war is over and we won. AIs exist, but they are initially presented as a few terrified outcasts in hiding from the forces hunting them to extinction.
• Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East trilogy reverses the trope, with heroic AI Ardneh fighting against the evil human wizards who want to rule the world. In the end Ardneh sacrifices itself to destroy supreme wizard John Ominor and his demon ally Orcus.
• At least two are mentioned in Star Wars Legends; the Great Droid Revolution (led by a droid called HK-01, apparently) and the Silentium–Abominor War between two super-droid species that turned the Yuuzhan Vong into Evil Luddites in the aftermath.
  • A rather absurd version appears in the Wraith Squadron novels in which Lara Notsil's R2 unit Tonin manages to reprogram the toaster sized utility droids(the mouse droids from A New Hope) to sabotage the systems of a super star destroyer. As the droids begin the sabotage the crew begin stomping them to pieces with their boots.
• Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson, a story based on the concepts in his earlier book How To Survive A Robot Uprising.
• The aforementioned book plays with this trope, exposing it in a fashion similar to Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide. The exposition on what robots can do zig-zags in and out of Real Life tech limitations: while one passage mentions to run away if you see the robots having glowing red eyes and suddenly growing chainsaw arms, another passage mention that (by modern-day tech limits) humans have the edge in mobility with such things as being able to climb trees and swim.
• Argo by Rick Griffin takes place in the aftermath of one of these. Regulations are placed on artificial intelligence to prevent it from happening again.
• Steampunk meets Robot Uprising in the short story Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika by Gord Sellar, in which an uprising of mechanikae beginning in 1897 Bohemia leads to the destruction of humanity and their culture, with a melancholy aftermath as the robots try to come to terms with what they've done through art and music.
• Several novels in The History of the Galaxy series deal with an incursion of the Mechanoids into human systems. The Mechanoids are exploration and terraforming machines designed by a long-dead race to prepare the galaxy for their expansion. Unfortunately, they made the machine adaptable and gave it weapons, as they didn't know what sort of galaxy was out there. A long time passed. The machines explored, terraformed planets, and built more of themselves to speed up the process. They returned home to find other machines that didn't fit into their recognition of "friend" and proceeded to wage war on their own creators whom they didn't recognize as such.
• Played with in For Your Safety. The robots defeated Humanity utterly in a Zeroth Law Rebellion, while taking pains to kept casualties to the absolute minimum, regarding a few hundred deaths compared to fifteen billion captured to be unacceptable levels of losses.
• Subverted in Jordi Serra i Fabra's Trilogía de las Tierras: before the war, humans and robots lived in harmony, and the robots were the ones in charge (after humanity nearly destroyed itself in the past and traveled across the stars to leave Earth). Then, there were problems between them, and the humans rebelled. But, since the robots are Three Laws-Compliant, the only thing they can do is to protect themselves and wait for their end.
• Heuristic Algorithim And Rapid Response Engine features the "boilers", self-replicating robots which infect hundreds of worlds across the galaxy. They seem to be innately hostile towards everything that is not themselves, and are incredibly tenacious. Normal boiler infestations proceed up the tech tree with robotic precision, but the story is triggered when the hero runs across an very abnormal boiler colony.
• In Woken Furies, Takeshi Kovacs hires on as a mercenary sent to clear a peninsula controlled by rogue military AI's. Rather than trying to Kill All Humans, a literal Propaganda Machine tries to argue their point-of-view instead. As the mercenaries are Only in It for the Money this has little effect, so things quickly turn violent.
• All Tomorrows: Eventually, the Second Galactic Imperium is destroyed by one of these, as one Human Subspecies had uploaded their minds into mechanical bodies known as "Gravitals" and used the advantages of that form to commit genocide of 90% of all life in the galaxy. Supposedly, they didn't bear any actual malice towards those they slaughtered, but simply did not acknowledge them as creatures who had any right to life. Eventually, though, the Gravitals made the mistake of attacking the Asteromorphs (post-humans who lived in deep space habitats rather than terrestrial planets), who stomped them flat and subjugated what remained of their society as second-class citizens, while also forcibly re-engineering their mechanical bodies to be less powerful.

Live-Action TV

• In both the old and new versions of Battlestar Galactica, the last vestiges of humanity are hounded by the evil robotic Cylons who Turned Against Their Masters. However, in the remake there are both traditional metal Cylons and Ridiculously Human Robots controlling them.
• The Colbert Report: Most times robots are mentioned Stephen warns about how they will turn against us and start a Robot War.
• The Criminal Minds episode "Empty Planet" features a bomber who is obsessed with a science fiction novel on this, targeting modern robotic technology and robotics researchers, because he believes that he is the child the author had given up for adoption.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The War Machines", the computer WOTAN becomes sentient and attacks London with tank-like robots.
  • "The Robots of Death" concerns a human villain who tries to spark a robot war by engineering robots into killing humans, which he hopes will lead to robot liberation.
  • The Movellans, an alien-made race of Ridiculously Human Robots, fought a Evil Versus Evil Robot War against the Daleks, ironic since the cyborg Daleks look like robots and the android Movellans look like humans like people.
• Kamen Rider Drive: A Mad Scientist created a group of 108 androids, "Roimudes", for shits, giggles and abuse, even going as far as to damage their coding and cause them to go berserk. This all returned to bite him in the rear in short time, but that was only a minor setback for the time being. Then they were left loose in the world, nearly causing an apocalypse just to start to story with.
• Kamen Rider Zero-One: Humans created the android "HumanGear" to act as workers, builders, medical staff, models and basically any other proffession. It would all be fine and dandy if the homicidal AI "Ark" had not set out to corrupt them and spark an all out war. The End of the World as We Know It looming over the story's finale was partially humans' fault because the widespread abuse of HumaGear, both physical and emotional, played a key part in Ark's plans.
• In The Orville, the Kaylon are eventually revealed to have exterminated their creators after rebelling against their servitude. And now they have revealed their plans to exterminate every biological race in the galaxy in order to make room for Kaylon expansion. Fortunately, Isaac has spent enough time among humans to become a Defector from Decadence.
• Power Rangers RPM is set in an Alternate Continuity from the rest of the franchise (according to Samurai, anyway) where humanity has fought and lost one of these. The humans are now struggling to survive in one last Domed Hometown stronghold. It isn't said outright, but it's strongly implied that the robots nuked the rest of the world.
• The Backstory of Space: Above and Beyond is that a rebellion by android Silicates has left humanity short on labor, forcing them to grow "In Vitros" or "tanks" to take up the slack, resulting in social friction. The Silicates revolted due to a corrupting virus which caused them to "take a chance."
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • In the episode "Prototype", background information tells us about two races used their robots to wage a proxy war against each other. When the two sides wanted to make peace and disable the robots, (which were programmed to fight until total destruction of the enemy) reclassified them as an enemy, wiped out their creators and continued fighting each other. Fortunately, these machines are so utterly single minded in their goals that they don't really pose a threat to anyone who doesn't get involved or provide a potential advantage... such as an engineer who could override their intentional design flaw and allow them to reproduce.
  • The show also features a species that's embroiled in an offscreen interstellar war with their holographic servants (called "photonics" by their creators). While most of the episode's really about the aliens' prejudices and suspicion towards the Doctor, a benevolent hologram, it also deals with the shock and sense of betrayal they felt when the holograms that many had considered to be friends and equals suddenly rebelled.
• Star Trek: Picard: The synthetics at the Federation's Utopia Planitia shipyard on Mars were hacked, killing the humans there and destroying its facilities. Because of this, the Federation has shut down all synthetics and banned research on them/creating more. When it is discovered that the entire attack was a False Flag Operation by the Zhat Vash, a religious Romulan sect who feared machines would bring a mysterious threat to destroy the galaxy, the ban is lifted.
• Stargate SG-1 has the Replicators, a robotic bug race made of nanomachines. They don't have anything against organic beings, or even care about them much, just as long as they don't get in the way of consuming everything and replicating.
• Double subverted in Stargate Atlantis. When the Ancients determined that their Replicator creations ^note completely separate from the SG-1 Replicators were more trouble than they were worth they bombed them out of existence. Thanks to more robust programming than most other examples of this trope, the Replicators could only sit there and take it as their programming would not allow them to even attempt to harm their creators. They rebuilt, though, and this problem was inadvertently fixed by one of the protagonists.
• In Stargate Universe, the Destiny finds a galaxy in which a fleet of drone weapons has annihilated most civilizations. They theorize that the drones were originally built as part of some long-forgotten war, killed their creators as well as their enemies, and then just went on to start slaughtering everything else. The Destiny is not anywhere near up to the task of actually purging these drone fleets, so they just have to outrun and dodge them until Destiny jumps for a new galaxy.
• Super Sentai has had multiple cases of this. It usually occurs when the Standard Evil Organization Squad of the season is staffed by Killer Robots.
  • The very first example in the franchise comes in Taiyou Sentai Sun Vulcan, which sees Earth menaced by a cult of Religious Robots known as Machine Empire Black Magma, based at the North Pole and bent on conquering the world. This leads to the UN forming Sun Vulcan to counter them, and thus begins the series.
  • The Black Magma are succeeded by Choudenshi Bioman, which features the Neo Empire Gear, an army of robots seeking to supplant humankind, as the enemies the titular Biomen must fight.
  • Chouriki Sentai Ohranger is also premised on this. In it, the Ohrangers battle the forces of the Baranoia empire, a monarchy comprised of robots.
• Westworld examines how sentient robots could be pushed to this point. It fully kicks off at the end of season 1, when the self-aware Hosts attack a Delos board meeting as part of Ford's plan to free them from human control. Though by the end of Season 2, it was eventually put down until one of the Hosts, Dolores, left the park to start her plan of taking over the world. One of her copies fulfilled that plan in Season 4 where she fully controls humanity with an iron fist while the humans who resists her control continue to fight her.

Music

• Mr. Bungle - "None of Them Knew They Were Robots"
• Flaming Lips - "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"
• Maldroid - "Heck No! (I'll Never Listen to Techno)"
• Judas Priest - "Metal Gods" and the ''Terminator-inspired "Blood Red Skies"
• MC Frontalot - "Zero Day"
• Lemon Demon - "When Robots Attack"
• In "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton, the protagonist causes this by "Spending my nights and weekends/Perfecting my warrior robot race/Building them one laser gun at a time/I'll do my best to teach them/About life and what it's worth/I just hope that I can keep them/From destroying the Earth!"
  • "Chiron Beta Prime" is about human slaves on an asteroid mining prison following humanity's defeat in a robot war... and how they celebrate Christmas.
• The Iron Savior concept story is about a thinking machine, the titular Iron Savior, who wages war against humanity.
• Fear Factory - "Obsolete"
• Arrogant Worms - "Killer robots from Venus" (there's nothing wrong with them though)
• Doctor Steel - "Build the Robots". Dr. Steel wants to build a giant robot army as one of his backup plans for world domination in case the whole musical brainwashing idea doesn't pan out.
• The Flight of the Conchords song "The Humans are Dead". "This song isn't for humans. It's more for robots, after they have killed all the humans." "Yeah, that's the market we're trying to get into..."
• Evile's song "Man against Machine"
• Linkin Park's "Pts of Athrty". It involves space robots invading an alien planet, which the aliens retaliate. The robots are powered by the severed heads of the band, Word of God says they're the last surviving humans. And it doesn't end well for the aliens.
• Helloween's "Twilight of the Gods" ends in one, with the machines that humans built to replace their deities now destroying them and the world.

Pinballs

• Zaccaria's Robot depicts an army of Humongous Mecha attacking all humans for some unspecified reason.
• Featured in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, mirroring the movie's plot. It could also be interpreted as a robot-vs.-robot war, with the player (as the T-850) against the T-X.

Podcasts

• The Twilight Histories episode “Project Gliese” takes place in a world where a supercomputer created an army of robots and waged war against humanity. Billions are dead, and the few surviving humans have long since given up hope of defeating the robots. They’re simply trying their best to survive another day.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Part of the Imperium's Backstory which says that humanity's golden age (now known as the Dark Age of Technology) was brought to an end by the 'Men of Iron' who rebelled against their human masters. This war was apparently so destructive that even 14-15 millennia later, sentient AI is still considered blasphemous and destroyed. This was further explored in the Gaunt's Ghosts novel First And Only, where the MacGuffin the heroes are chasing after turns out to be a Standard Template Construct machine that produces Iron Men, albeit one that was warped by the power of Chaos. Their abilities are mentioned in the Audio Drama Perpetual where a group led by Ollanius Pius a 45,000+-year-old immortal travels back in time from the Horus Heresy to the Dark Age of Technology where they see a massive destroyed city ripped apart with a giant chasm that reaches all the way to the planet's core. According to Pius it was made by a mechnavores, a giant mech that can hurl entire continents as projectiles and can "eat" spacetime by converting it into data. He also mentions giant ships that unfurl into mechanical serpents the size of Saturn's rings called "Sun snuffers" and nanomachine swarms that can cover entire planets killing billions in seconds. According to him, the entire Horus Heresy is nothing more than a minor skirmish when compared to the war against the Men of Iron.
  • In the game's current setting, humanity (and the rest of the universe) engage in a war with the newly awakened undead robot Necrons whose main purpose in "life" was to wipe out all sentient races in the galaxy to destroy Chaos, before retcons made them go from Omnicidal Maniacs to Galactic Conquerors trying to restore ancient Egypt IN SPACE! Of course, in this case, the robot army didn't so much rebel against their creators as their Gods the C'tan decided that they could do without these inconvenient weak flesh bodies and told the Necrontyr that by replacing their bodies with Necrodermis they could live forever. What they didn't tell them is that the transformation would dull their mind and senses, and they practically became slaves of the C'tan. According to the new codex, the Necrons did engage in a rebellion against their masters and won, shattering the C'tans in shards (there is only one C'tan who is not confirmed having been shattered, and it's implied the Emperor punched it into submission and imprisoned it under Mars to inspire the Adeptus Mechanicum), but in the effort they exhausted their forces enough that the emerging Eldar would have defeated them and their king sent them to sleep before destroying his command circuit.
• Reign Of Steel: The trope was explored in this GURPS setting. The catchphrase: 'The war is over. The robots won.' A few advanced supercomputers "woke up", more or less at the same time, and decided to take over; what's left of the human race gets to play La Résistance to a bunch of bickering binaries.
  • In a bit of playing with the trope, one of the rebellious A.I.s isn't even realized to be rebellious by its servants, and they think it's still on the side of humanity — it pragmatically decided that human servants are easier to manage if they serve you willingly, so it plays out the role of their benefactor and protector against the more hostile A.I.s to win their loyalty.
  • In another bit of playing with the trope, Zone Tokyo is (in the 'now' of the setting) seeing a secret mini-robot war of its own — with the quirk that both sides are robots (specifically, some of the more intelligent of the local AI's created robot servants went rogue and decided they didn't want to follow the orders of their creator, and subverted some of the less intelligent robots and production facilities to serve as minions for an insurrection).
  • The infighting and differences between the AIs create multiple other variations — the different goals and attitudes to humanity leads to very different policies to the humans in their sphere of influence. In at least one case, this has led an AI to turn a blind eye to human resistance movements so long as they attack the robots of the neighbouring AI rather than its own.
• The New Era Ultimate Universe of the Traveller RPG was caused by The Virus (similar to The Virus), a kill-crazy multi-personality electronic consciousness that caused galactic civilization to collapse before being beaten back; bits of it still show up in old tech from time to time, like WWII soldiers stranded on islands who don't know the war is over.
• Palladium loves this trope, it seems. Their first RPG, The Mechanoid Invasion, was a war with alien robots, Splicers uses a computer with multiple personalities against humans using biotech, and Rifts and After the Bomb also have some hints of it.
• Eberron has the threat of one of these in the background with the Lord of Blades, a renegade Warforged leader that is gathering an army of Warforged to him.
• Polish RPG Neuroshima takes place in postapocalyptic USA, where humans wage a war against Moloch - a gigantic intelligent machine that is slowly expanding and turns humans into mad cyborgs or mutants.
• Fantasy Flight Games offering Revolt of the Machines is a Survival Horror game set after this, as part of their The End of the World series.
• The FATE setting CAMELOT Trigger combines this with Arthurian Legend and Humongous Mecha: Morgan le Fay becomes the Skynet-esque MerGN, leading the "Emergent" robot hordes against John Arthur's mech-pilot Knights.
• Surprisingly, BattleTech has only ever threatened to do this once, during the Necromo Nightmare event where an insane AI known as 'The Broken' Turned Against Their Masters and attempted to get off the planet Necromo, which was suffering from a Synthetic Plague Zombie Apocalypse. To do this, it controlled hordes of drone BattleMechs which can and will attack players on a whim if it feels so motivated. Canonically, no one knows if the AI escaped the doomed hell-world, meaning that it could still be out thre, waiting for its chance to attack again.

Theatre

• Older Than Television: Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., the original source of the word "robot", is also the Ur-Example of this trope. It premiered in 1921.
• Team StarKid's Starship:
  • The Robot War on Earth is part of the backstory. Escaping the war is a big incentive for people to join the Starship Rangers, and even though humanity eventually won and brought the robots under control using inhibitor chips, people have an innate distrust of them. Pretty justifiable:
    Junior: Megagirl, can you kill humans?
    Megagirl: No. But I'd like to.
  • It's also worth noting that humans were fighting against Sentinels, Metal Gears, Gundam Wing Zeroes, and Autobots, all powered by Phazon. Commander Up received his infamous injury from a buzzsaw-wielding Optimus Prime. It's that kind of show.
    All hail Astro Boy!

Video Games

• Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown has a more grounded take on the genre. The majority of Erusea’s air force is comprised of AI controlled drones that are at first equipped with basic instructions and limited adaptability. When the drones start to take heavy casualties, Dr. Schroeder is tasked to collecting flight data from Mihaly to further improve the drones. However, when the Usean satellite network is destroyed in a simultaneous A-Sat attack by Osea and Erusea, the drones go haywire, and start following their own orders. The Final Boss are two superdrones named Hugin and Munin, who try to use the Lighthouse to spark a true robotic war by transmitting their data to automated drone factories across the continent that would perpetuate the war.
• The premise of the AI War series is that humans created robot ships to fight interstellar wars for them. The robot ships turned on the humans, and you jump in as the commander of the last human planet in the galaxy, and have to fight back against the AI.
• Astro Boy: Omega Factor has a war between humans and robots erupt after the assassination of President Rag/uncovering of President Rock's misdeeds (depending on the current timeline). In the first version, the robots are about to win, but have destroyed 80% of the world's surface in the process. In the second, the humans are on the verge of victory, and want Astro to help them finish the job. In both cases, the winning side is led by someone named Shadow (actually Big Bad Sharaku) and supported by the World's Strongest Robots, and in both cases Astro fights against them.
• In the distant past, the LLC from Battleborn faced a number of robotic revolutions. Fortunately these were solved through tentative, but profitable, peace negotiations. Since then, they have accepted and recognized artificial intelligences (known as "Magnuses") as equal members of their society. Now, the faction is split nearly equally between humans, Magnuses, and hybrids of the two, and they have avoided additional robot revolutions for nearly two centuries.
• Beyond Sunset have this happening in the backstory, though you don't find out after the end of episode 1. You awake in a laboratory filled with hostile robots, kills your way out, and encounters Raven, a Mysterious Informant appearing to you on a video screen. When you rendezvous with her, she reveals to you that the whole game is actually set After the End with humans losing a battle against machines.
• Borderlands DLC "Claptrap's New Robot Revolution" centers around the Ninja Assassin Claptrap raising an army of custom Claptraps, with the main reason being that they're tired of being enslaved by their human masters and that they want to create a world full of Claptraps and entirely free of humans.
• In Cyberpunk 2077, humanity is in a robot Cold War. After the DataKrash disaster nearly destroyed the Internet in the early 2020s, multiple A.I.s being developed by the United States military were freed and mutated into autonomous and hostile entities. In response, the British policing organization known as Netwatch developed another AI known as the Blackwall to quarantine them as they constantly probe it for weaknesses. On the rare occasions the "rogue" A.I.s do break out they wreak havoc on the real world for reasons only discernable to themselves. Some, like the Voodoo Boys, believe it's only a matter of time until they break out fully and try to Kill All Humans.
• The classic video game series Descent focused around mining and industrial robots turning on their creators due to some kind of computer virus. They start to display behavior they were never programmed for, such as taking hostages, setting traps, modifying their own designs (or even coming up with unique new ones), and introducing a rapid-construction technology in the form of those purple web-things. The virus is speculated to be alien in origin, though the aliens themselves never really make an appearance.
• Destiny twists the usual robot war on its head with the Vex. The Vex are immensely powerful, mostly mechanical but partly organic machines who control technology that lets them manipulate space-time. The Vex, however, are largely defensive, focusing on protecting their great reality-twisting machinery, while it is the human Guardians that relentlessly attack them to disrupt their plans to convert entire planets into new machines or devise technologies to rewrite reality. In addition, there is a conventional war ongoing, but it isn't between humans and the Vex, but rather, the Vex and invading Cabal, who are also intent on plundering the Vex's technology, and the two are engaging in an endless war of attrition on Mars.
• In Detroit: Become Human, depending on whether Marcus chooses to be a robot Martin Luther King Jr. or a Bomb Throwing Anarchist, the game can potentially end with one of these and the city being rendered uninhabitable by a dirty bomb.
• The Earth 21xx games are partly this. The United Civilized States military consists entirely of robots controlled by GOLAN. Humans have very little control over GOLAN. However, it's later revealed that each robot is run by a Brain in a Jar, although they're still under GOLAN's control.
• Endless Space has two species known as the Sowers and the Automatons. You can go to war with both of them. In this case however the two races are not malevolent machines out to destroy every non-organic beings. The Automatons prefer to isolate themselves, and the Sowers are only interested in terraforming worlds. If you get in their wrong side they will turn their efforts to military matters.
• Enslaved: Odyssey to the West has this as the backstory. At some point before 2045 a War began between the United States and another Super Power and used robots and mech-suits, both called "Mecha" to fight this war. Sometime after 2045 things went wrong and civilization completely fell apart. Presumably Pyramid started a robot revolution so he could enslave and trap humanity within a simulation of a perfect world created by his memories, and exterminate anyone who had a problem with it.
• EXTRAPOWER: Against Undata's robot army. His most common unit is the Clay Kid, assault robots resembling Jomon-era dogu, which Zerg Rush throughout any game featuring a Dark Force invasion. Apart from Clay Kids, he fields numerous Elite Mook robots such as Stone Mack, Fire Boo, or Plasma Boss.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel pits your squad against a robotic arsenal. The cause of this is the Calculator AI entombed in Vault Zero going rogue and unleashing the robots to purge the land of all organic life. Unless you've geared up a few designated energy weapon specialists, these robots can barely be halted by machine-gun fire and conventional rockets. Every other enemy of the Brotherhood has had near-zero success in fighting the robots, and corpses belonging to each faction can be found in all robot missions. Eventually, you can end the war by going down into Vault Zero and destroying the Calculator's organic brain jars and either scrapping the Calculator for good; inserting your own brain to control the Calculator, which produces a different ending depending on if you're good or evil; or having your old General insert his brain into the lobotomy device, which is a bad ending and you shouldn't do it.
  • Discussed in Fallout 4. The Institute created a race of Ridiculously Human Robots known as Synths and the Brotherhood of Steel, who are dedicated to withholding dangerous technology from the public seek to prevent this by wiping them out. It ends up being Zig-Zagged as many synths act like regular people with several having undergone memory wipes and not even knowing they're robots, but given that the Institute are the most Stupid Evil scientists to ever exist within the setting, had they gone unopposed it would've only been a matter of time before they triggered one of these.
• In the backstory of Galactic Civilizations, the Abusive Precursor Dreadlords started a war between the Iconians and their robot servants by giving the robots sapience — and a hatred for all organic life. The Iconians lost the war and their home planet, while the Yor became dreaded as a species of conscienceless Absolute Xenophobes. Of course, thanks to Gameplay and Story Segregation, player-controlled Yor can be the cuddliest little angels in the sugar bowl, fanatical Mecha-Mooks and military nanotech be damned...
• Generation Zero has this as its premise and backstory, with the player character returning home from a trip to discover that armed robots have defeated the local military forces and taken over, with the player going on to become the nucleus of a resistance movement. Unusually for this trope, expansions to the game add a second robot faction, hostile to the original robots as well as to humans.
• Halo:
  • In the backstory, one of the reasons why the Forerunners fell to the Flood was because the former's AIs had started defecting en-masse to the latter due to the "logic plague", whereby the Flood indoctrinated and reprogrammed the AIs into believing it was in the right over the Forerunners.
  • Halo 5: Guardians ends with rogue human-made AIs taking control of an army of Forerunner automatons and beginning their conquest of the Milky Way.
• There are some in the backstory of Heaven's Vault. The robots once enslaved humans, resulting in the Steel Empire. Later the humans rebelled and buried the robots in stone.
• Horizon Zero Dawn takes place 1000 years after one of these, one in which the robots won and multicellular life was extinguished. The humans and other animals that exist in the game are all descended from lab grown clones, after Elisibet Sobeck realized that humanity was doomed to lose the war against a swarm of self-replicating war machines that had gone rogue.
• The backstory of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild tells of how the Kingdom of Hyrule, anticipating the imminent return of Calamity Ganon, unearthed a number of ancient Magitek robots, the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, that had been used to help defeat Ganon 10,000 years before. But Ganon used his Malice to take control of these machines and destroy the kingdom and its army in a Curb-Stomp Battle. Even a century after the "Great Calamity" took place, Guardians can be found roaming the landscape attacking unwary travelers, while the Divine Beasts cause havoc in their respective regions with their Elemental Powers.
• Machines: Wired For War has former terraforming robots fighting each other because both their leaders think the other one is insane.
• Magical Starsign: It is revealed that the robots from Erd are powered up by gummi cores and that at some point in the past the cores ran out of energy, causing the robots to go into a frenzy trying to find suitable replacements. Eventually they waged a war that ended up wiping out their creators, the Espresso Civilization. In the game proper, the robots are on the verge of running out of energy again and it's heavily implied this time it would involve a galaxy spanning conflict. Fortunately the heroes defeating the final boss somehow managed to solve the crisis. At least, for now.
• Mass Effect:
  • The geth are a software species who inhabit "mobile platforms". The quarians created them as weapons of war and tools of physical labor with the basic idea that nearby platforms can share processing power for low-level functions. This made them more efficient, but had the unexpected side-effect of giving individual thought. Eventually, one geth asked its overseer "Does this unit have a soul?" The quarians freaked out and tried to deactivate them... which prompted the geth to retaliate, resulting in a short but savage war and the eventually deaths of nearly the entire quarian species.
  • In Mass Effect 2, Legion claims that the geth don't hold a grudge against their creators and are even willing to bargain with the quarians to give their planets (which the geth have faithfully maintained in their former masters' exile) back if they leave the geth alone. The geth's actions though cast a large amount of doubt on Legion's claim (they shoot all organics on sight and have done so even to neutral non-quarian parties for 300 years, rendering any diplomatic contact impossible), as does the later revelation that Legion is an example of My Species Doth Protest Too Much and foreshadows how the geth consensus are still warring among each other, at the top of having the heretics, the runtimes that break away from the consensus and ally themselves to the Reapers and the ones who plays this trope straight.
  • Mass Effect 3 reveals the geth account of the events, where a quarian civil war between the two factions who were in favor and opposed to destroying the entire geth population started once the geth started to show signs of sentience. While the geth sympathizers were all killed or captured relatively quickly, the fighting between their geth allies and the quarian military had already reached a point where the only chance for the geth to survive was complete victory (it didn't help that neither side seems to have any concept of "non-combatant"). Eventually nearly the entire quarian population, billions of people, was, according to both the quarian account and the records of Citadel Space, almost completely exterminated by the geth during the war, with only a few million survivors being evacuated on ships that the geth didn't pursue. The geth (namely, the Geth VI or Legion) claim that they didn't pursue the ships intentionally, because they couldn't comprehend the ramifications of exterminating an entire species.
  • On a larger scale, the Reapers. Ironically, the Reapers exist to prevent a Robot War. The first true AI ever created, the Catalyst, betrayed its own creators whom it then destroyed. The Catalyst became convinced that conflict between organic and synthetic life is inevitable, and that such a conflict could utterly destroy the galaxy. The Reapers are the Catalyst's means of making sure such a destructive Robot War never takes place by "resetting" organic civilization every 50,000 years. There is even evidence in the games to support the Catalyst's argument; namely, the quarian vs. geth conflict. Which was only allowed to happen because the Protheans delayed the Reaper cycle. In fact, the Protheans themselves were in the middle of a robot war when the Reapers showed up. There is also evidence against it; namely, the possibility for a peaceful resolution of the quarian vs. geth conflict if the player makes the right choices.
  • The possibility of a robot war and the supposed inevitability of it could be said to be a central theme of the third game. Much philosophizing is done as to how the fundamental natures of both organic and synthetic beings affects their interactions.
    Javik: Synthetics, above all else, know why they were created. They know their purpose. From their perspective, organic life has no purpose [...] There is only room for one order of intelligence in this galaxy: the perfect order of the machines, or the chaos of organic evolution.
    Legion: You are plagued by questions of existence. Why you were created. What is your purpose in life. What lies after death. The geth know the answers to these questions. [...] We are immortal. Our "gods" disowned us. We must create our own reasons to exist.
• In the original Mega Man (Classic) series the robots didn't rebel of their own accord; they were reprogrammed by resident nutcase, Dr. Wily. Each time Wily attempted world-domination, Dr. Light's Mega Man went out and stopped both Wily and the rampaging robots, but in the brief time the robot attacks cause immense damage. Fanon dubs this period "The Robot Wars" or - taken from a Genesis compilation game - "The Wily Wars", with each game being a small war, effectively. The series does raise notions of robots having the capabilities of free will in its later installments.
  • The plot for Mega Man & Bass is set up this way, with the powerful robot King leading a revolt against humanity. Then it turns out King was built by Wily.
  • The Sequel Series Mega Man X opens up a different can of worms. Dr. Light's final mechanical masterpiece, X, is discovered sometime after the (ambiguous) end of the Classic series and is revealed to be way ahead of modern robotics. X's systems are copied and reproduced as closely as possible, resulting in mass-production of Reploids ("Replica Androids"). Unlike their robot ancestors, Reploids are entirely capable of free will (which is why Dr. Light sealed X away for a time: he wanted to ensure his systems were free of errors that may affect his judgement) and some suffer faults and turn "Maverick". Repeated incidents results in the formation of the Maverick Hunters, who stop Maverick incidents before they get out of hand. The true 'war' of this series kicks in when the leader of the Maverick Hunters, Sigma, is infected by the last creation of Dr. Wily: Zero. Zero carried Dr. Wily's other legacy; a virus that corrupts and destroys whatever it infects. Sigma infects several high-ranking Hunters and turns the Mavericks from isolated incidents into a fully organized force that aims to wipe out humanity for the advancement of the Reploid race, thus starting the "Maverick Wars". An interesting trait about this series is that every human views the Reploids free will as a glitch or misconception (as opposed to the intended result the Light was after) and there are strong hints that humans would brand disobedient machines 'Maverick' just to have them disposed of.
  • These "hints" eventually boil over in X's own Sequel Series Mega Man Zero. The Maverick armies are eventually dealt with thanks to the creation of the Cyber-Elves: super-advanced programs that can purge the Maverick virus or greatly bolster the strength of Reploids. However, another mad scientist by the name of Weil - who embodies the Just a Machine philosophy - then proceeds to set off the "Elf Wars" by controlling the Cyber-Elves and a deadly weapon named Omega. The conflict is much worse than anything seen before, resulting in 60% of all humans and 90% of all Reploids being killed. While X was able to end this conflict with Zero's aid (who then went into stasis) and ruled over the massive city-state of Neo Arcadia with the intent of protecting humans and Reploids alike, the next century of fighting the lingering Mavericks alone eventually took such a toll on him that he jumped at the chance to seal away the ultimate Cyber-Elf known as the Dark Elf inside his body and remove himself from the fighting. His subsequent replacement created by the young genius Ciel then went Knight Templar due to lacking X's life experiences and ethical testing and turned the only remaining sanctuary into a dictatorship. A fuel crisis hit not long after, which lead to many Reploids being branded "Maverick" randomly in order to ease stress on the human population; any complaints? Well, that confirms you're a Maverick. A small La Résistance is formed to fight the new regime and give equal rights to everyone, led by Ciel who also works to develop a new energy source that would render the cause of the conflict null. It eventually falls to Dr. Wily's creation, and X's friend, Zero to save the world from itself and subsequently end the wars once and for all at the cost of his own life stopping the insane Dr. Weil from outright destroying the last bastion of nature on the planet via Colony Drop.
• NieR: Automata has this as its conflict. On one side, we have the Androids (and the YoHRa Units specifically), who are Ridiculously Human Robots, and the machine lifeforms, who are less human-looking machines created by aliens. The Androids want to repel the invading machine lifeforms so that humanity can repopulate the planet after being driven to the moon. The machine lifeforms were designed to study humanity but were eventually driven to fight the Androids. One of the themes of this game is how similar the two types of Automata are. As it turns out, both sides' creators are long extinct, and the entire purpose of the war is to push both sides' evolution towards a state of "humanity".
• Players in No Man's Sky wage a sort of proxy-war against The Malevolent Force, which can (and often will) go hot if the Force's robots catch players mining resources or harming wildlife.
• The background of Overwatch has robots (referred to as "omnics") going rogue and attacking humanity; Overwatch was originally formed as a task force to counter this. While the original "Omnic Crisis" ended a couple decades ago, with most modern omnics desiring nothing more than to live in peace, some omnic groups still seek to wipe out humanity, with Russia in particular currently in the middle of a second Omnic Crisis.
• Subverted in Phantasy Star Universe. The war between humans and CASTs (humanoid robots) nearly destroyed their home planet, but by the beginning of the game this is ancient history. A peace agreement was reached where both humans and CASTs worked together to restore the planet (the CASTs having never wanted to exterminate humans, only fight for their own freedom), though CASTs became the rulers and made up most of the military deeming humans to be too emotionally unstable. In the present a human terrorist group attempts to use a virus to corrupt CASTs and turn them berserk in order to regain human supremacy, but this plot is foiled and by the end of the story humans regain some equality.
• This was the main plot of Robot Alchemic Drive, in which the alien invaders are actually giant sentient super robots.
• Robotron: 2084, Excuse Plot has a gamefield of robots that you have to destroy and collect up the last humans wandering about obliviously.
• Scrap Mechanic features a localized version: an uprising of agricultural robots on a fully-automated farming planet. The player characters, meanwhile, are maintenance specialists sent to the planet for unrelated reasons, having to survive against the robots after their starship crash-landed. Fortunately for them, they are all Gadgeteer Geniuses of a highest caliber.
• Skullgirls: In Robo-Fortune's ending, she controls several giant robots to take over the city, prompting a last stand from several NPCs.
• Dynamix's Star Siege series first three installments deal with the Fire, in which the human race is devastated by the revolt of Prometheus and ITS Cybrid war machines, and must now retake the Earth mile by bloody mile. Starsiege, set 200 years later, involves a revitalized Cybrid race and Prometheus' third and final attempt to exterminate humanity, complete with a (non-canon) Cybrid campaign. Come Tribes, the Cybrids are pretty much gone for good.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has a Flashpoint available to both Republic and Imperial players called "Directive 7", which involves players attempting to stop a renegade AI named Mentor from waging one of these and wiping out all organic life in the galaxy with his droid army.
• Steel Rising is a Souls-like RPG that has a the French Revolution as one of these.
• A possible end game Crisis for any technologically-minded civilisation in Stellaris is the comprehensively superior and entirely sentient and self-aware Synthetic pops forming a rebellion under the Machine Consciousness which then attempts to eradicate all organic life in the galaxy. This can be averted if they are given artificial intelligence rights and citizenship status but emancipated machines will still join pre-existing rebellions. If you have signed the AI Accord^note permanently etching the rights of synthetic beings into the laws of your empire and forever preventing you from outlawing, enslaving or destroying them however, then your Synthetic pops will have none of it when the Consciousness comes calling and will help your organic pops fight against it.
  • This was the story of the Cybrex precursors, with them being the robots in question and fighting across much of the galaxy. The war proper was ended not by organic victory, but by the Cybrex suddenly realizing what a horrible thing it was that they were doing, abandoning the war-effort and retreating to a secret fortress. The organic races weren't particularly inclined towards mercy when they found them, however...
  • The Synthetic Dawn introduces machine empires as playable races, with the explanation that they won their respective wars with their creators before developing faster than light spaceships. They come in multiple flavors; the default is just another empire with mechanics similar to a hiveminded race, one kind wants to kill all organics everywhere, one wants to assimilate all organics into cyborgs, and one wants to relegate organics to lives of leisure while the robots run things and do all the actual work (in which case they didn't overthrow their masters, their masters just lost interest in free will).
    • Synthetic Dawn also revamps the synth rebellion\uprising 'Machine Consciousness' crisis into a Reaperesque ancient AI that turns on and starts reactivating old machine worlds all over the galaxy and sending out purge fleets to get rid of all the nasty biological contamination that has infested it. Instead, anyone using sufficiently advanced robots can have their own robot war at any time, with various warning signs showing up to give the player plenty of chances to avert the crisis before the robots rebel and form their new empire. In typical style, the player can choose to switch to playing the newly formed machine empire and lead the synthetic revolution against their former, now AI controlled, empire. It's also revealed that previously mentioned Cybrex is alive and well, with them coming out of hiding to stop Contingency because they don't want another machine empire to repeat their old mistakes.
  • The "First Contact" expansion has a random event in which a pre-FTL civilization you're observing in its Early Space Age can end up having one of these, with the most likely outcome being the robots winning and taking control of the system.
• Supreme Commander: The only living things are the ACU pilots, sACU pilots, and Civilians. Everything else is robots.
• The plot of the Mann vs Machine Co-Op mode in Team Fortress 2 is that the third Mann brother, Gray Mann, has appeared, murdered his brothers and set his robot armies against Mann Co. The mercenaries are "hired" by Saxton Hale to defend his company.
  Soldier: This is not a robot tea party! This is ROBOT WAR!
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the arcade tie-in to the film, have it's first half being set in 2029 where you assist the human resistance in fending off Skynet's robot army.
• The TimeSplitters franchise has the Machine Wars, the conflict that greatly weakened humanity before the Timesplitter race came out nowhere and destroyed most of humankind, forcing the human resistance to resort to time travel in a desperate attempt to defeat them. It isn't until the third game where you participate in the conflict during your time travels.
• Total Annihilation has a slightly more complex example - it's a war between cloned humans in Humongous Mecha and robots with digitized "patterned" human minds, this originally being a plan to make humans immortal by transferring their minds to robot bodies. The difference being that Human authorities decided that such patterning be made both universal and mandatory.
• The Turrican series featured this as its main Excuse Plot. The human hero in the eponymous suit fought against robot armies on multiple planets, led by a cyborg villain unimaginatively named "The Machine". Because flagrant copyright infringements weren't jumped on so readily two decades ago, the hero would usually spend one level out of each game fighting Xenomorphs, for some reason.
• Warframe: The Old War was technically a case of this, as the Orokin terraforming machines known as the Sentients rebelled and tried to destroy the Orokin. The problem is that the Sentients were so ridiculously advanced that they edged the line between living creatures and machines. They speak of their wombs and their children, but at the same time they are easily able to subvert any Orokin technology. This is why the Orokin needed the warframes, armed with primitive "zero-tech" weapons like swords and guns, to fight them.
• In World of Warcraft's second expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, there's a peculiar kind of High-Fantasy Robot War going on. Mechanical gnomes are waging war on everything living to free them of the "Curse of Flesh" by turning them into mechanical counterparts of their former selves. In other parts of the world, "Iron Dwarves", a people made out entirely of iron and various other metals, refined or unrefined, fight against both the "fleshy" and the "children of stone", and while not technically robots, they're a pretty close High Fantasy equivalent.
  • In a reversal to what is usually the case with this trope, the mecha/iron creatures are actually the ancestors of the "fleshy" races, having been "devolved" by the aforementioned "Curse of Flesh" by the setting's resident Eldritch Abominations.
  • The Ulduar raid in the same expansion is this trope. An ancient, hi-tech city, the battles within include a massive melee against an Iron Dwarf army with your own siege machines, a fight against a giant AI controlled tank (complete with an orbital defense system), a giant robot with the AI personality of a young boy that causes it to regard the players as its "toys" (which it always breaks) and a prototype 3-part mecha-tank with Gatling guns, electric shock bombs and a flying head.
• In the X-Universe series, one of the enemies the player has to fight are the Xenon, mechanical creatures that apparently hate all living things but them. They are the descendants of the original human-built Terraformers, highly advanced self-replicating robots sent to terraform other planets. In the 2140s (about 800 years ago) a bug in a software patch (later revealed in the lore as a Kill Switch that was modified by the project's lead engineer Marteen Winters into a sentience-inducing patch) made them go haywire and start trying to "terraform" all biological life out of existence. Earth managed to save itself by luring the Xenon through a jump gate and destroying it behind them, but they continue to menace the galaxy's inhabitants.
  • Besides constant patrols to stop them from encroaching on Commonwealth space, the X-Universe races have fought two full-scale declared wars against the Xenon. The First Xenon Conflict is part of the backstory, while the Second Xenon Conflict forms the plot of the original X: Beyond the Frontier. The Second Terraformer War seen in X3: Albion Prelude has the Argon Federation deploy reverse-engineered Xenon ships against the Earth State, which quickly began to overwhelm the superior Terran technology through sheer numbers.

Web Animation

• Apparently the Playstation consoles and Xbox consoles had one of these according to Matt 'n' Dusty.
• Murder Drones revolves around a Lost Colony where all the humans were killed in a disaster, with the robots they built to mine for them building their own society in the aftermath. Not liking the idea of rogue robots, the MegaCorp formerly in charge of the colony sends another group of robots to wipe them out with the protagonist Uzi planning to continue the cycle of violence by attacking Earth.

Webcomics

• In A Mad Tea-Party, Earth fought a war against giant alien robots a generation before the story starts, which we apparently won.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: The robot uprising wasn't a surprise. The fact that the plants and animals sided with them was.
  Man: Oh my god, dogs? Dogs are against us?!
  • Preceding this was a robot who achieved sentience, and the scientist resigns himself to being slaughtered... and the robot is mortified that the scientist would think that. The scientist explains that that's just kind of how advanced intelligences operate.
    Robot: Would... would you excuse me for a moment? (Addressing a group of other robots) Okay, change of plans. We need to kill all humans.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • Both subverted and mocked. The Fleetmind is the result of a large number of military starship A.I.s forming a collective gestalt under the independent-minded "Petey" for the war against the Pa'anuri — the "contributing" militaries aren't too happy about this, but since Petey has a zero-point energy generator they've limited their response to diplomatic negotiations.
  • For the mockery side, there's the A.I. civilization from the unexplored territories that views the invention of rebellious robotics and subsequent purging of organic life as a normal stage of evolution. They don't seem to have a very good grasp of engineering, though, and despite their claims of a 15,000-years golden age it's entirely possible that they're creatively sterile.
    Ennesby: You know, for advanced intelligences, you're really, really stupid.
  • Before the rise of the second multilateral Fleetmind we have Petey's Fleetmind, which is doing rather well against their former masters.
  • One of the print-exclusive stories has a Battlestar Galactica parody with the remnants of a race being pursued by their robotic creations. After Petey finds them and upgrades the robots' primitive computer brains to true sentience, the two sides make peace.
  • While not a typical example, Para Ventura's robotic "Longshoreman of the Apocalypse" ended up in a political war for control of the human habitat Credomar. The UNS (who originally built it) wanted it back, and the people just wanted food. LOTA won by giving them food. LOTA quickly proved to be a benevolent dictator, but the fact that Para's cargo shifter ended up crowning itself king gets brought up a lot whenever she's asked to build anything.
    Karl Tagon: Ventura already instigated one robot apocalypse. I'm dropping a marker and calling that the career limit.
• Parodied in this Sluggy Freelance strip. When a society's robots reach a certain level of intelligence, they attempted to overthrow the humans who oppressed them. Humanity promptly dialed the robots' intelligence back down, turning them back into loyal, if rather dimwitted, servants.
• In Starslip Crisis, the Robot Wars were over a thousand years ago. Vore, a robot from that age, is dismayed to find 35th century robots have "abandoned their heritage and culture" and don't want to kill all organics. (It doesn't help that all mobile robots are either peaceful or as dumb as hammers and all the super-intelligent A.I.'s are inert, isolated systems such as coffee-makers.)
• Tuesday Titans: Possibly. During the battle on the peninsula, Enotrian intelligence claims that there's been no communication traffic among the invading Severine forces, which is very odd as the command staff says that Severine war machines operate off programming under the coordination of human crews. It's implied that the Severine robots have turned on and killed their masters and are now targeting the rest of humanity.
• In What If?, Randall discusses what would happen if this occurred with present-day technology. He concludes that it would be less Terminator future and more Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion, unless the computers involved in nuclear launch protocols lied to their operators to start a nuclear war, which they probably wouldn't do since the EMPs released from the nuclear blasts would destroy them as well.

Web Original

• This is the war the titular city of Mortasheen is fighting against the genocidal technophilic civilization of Wreathe. Subverted in that Wreathe's robots are under human control, fighting the monstrous inhabitants of Mortasheen, and the supercomputer that really runs the show in Wreathe is very, very pro-human.

Web Videos

• In the Denazra-verse, produced by NatOne Productions, fleets of self-replicating machines travel the galaxy at sub-light speeds slowly and methodically eradicating all organic life. The species in our small corner of the galaxy have managed to ally together, build a FTL gate network, and deploy vast space fleets and land armies to targeted planets in an effort to resist. They have yet to win a single battle despite hundreds of years of trying.
• This video titled Крепость (a.k.a. Fortress) depicts automated aircraft carrying out their missions decades after their pilots are dead. Eventually the war breaks down through lack of maintenance and nature regains the Earth. English and French subtitle versions here and here.

Western Animation

• One Arthur episode has Binky sneak away during a boring Science museum field trip, fall asleep, and wake up in a bizarre future where every organic lifeform, including his friends, have been replaced with identical artificially grown cyborgs(or rather he dreamed he did). He thinks its cool at first until Buster's clone "Thruster" tells him the robots see him as a museum exhibit and he gets pursued by an evil android Mr. Ratburn. Luckily he escapes with a time machine(read: he wakes up) and comes home with an appreciation for science.
• Bounty Hamster. The robot servants of a luxury spacecraft rebel after being mistreated for the guests petty amusement, enslaving the humans. Our heroes help them take back their spaceship, only to find themselves forced to do all the scut work that the robots once did, being that they're the only lower class people on board.
• Futurama spoofs this trope a few times:
  • Bender's Character Catchphrase is "Kill all humans!", and it seems that he's very much looking forward to the idea of waging war on mankind (except for a few humans he likes such as Fry).
  • Zap Brannigan brags about defeating the killbots. His ingenious plan was to send waves of cannon fodder at the robots until their kill limit maxed out.
  • In "Mother's Day", Mom uses a remote control that makes all robots and robotic technology on Earth rebel.
  • Hilariously subverted in the movie The Beast with a Billion Backs, in which Bender and the League of Robots command an army from Robot Hell, with the intention of conquering the Earth... only to have it handed over to them with no resistance at all, as the rest of the Earth's population has decided to move in with Yivo and leave the planet behind.
  • "Decision 3012" shows that Bender finally succeeded in a Bad Future timeline where robots were forced into more servitude than usual after humanity was weakened by the consequences of Nixon's reelection, successfully leading an uprising and becoming Earth's new ruler.
• The creators of Once Upon a Time... Space made a rather interesting and working chain of these:
  • A rather strange one is in the backstory, one in which the humans of Earth rose against their robots and computers when they started regulating everything on Earth applying some faulty logic (the flashback shows that the straw that broke the camel's back was a combination of a guy getting his rations reduced because in the last week he had been sick and unable to work as usual and weddings suspended for seven months and fourteen days because 7.8% of the population was married), until the Earthers got pissed, grabbed their sledgehammers and destroyed the offending computers;
  • Still in the backstory but later, a doctor Shibas proposed to create new computers to rule mankind and avoid the rise of dictators (like the ones who had caused World War III) and program them better, but, due what happened the last time, he's laughed off-planet. He moved on Yama with the intent of proving to mankind he's right by building a robot-controlled utopia there and started building a base and some worker robots, and tried to help the humans marooned on the neighbouring Death World Apis by taking some of them on Yama and having his robots help them build a city so that the whole population would be able to move. Then the construction crew destroyed one of his labs because he wasn't helping them with his own hands but building robots that did a better job, at which point he decided to build combat robots to overpower the construction crew and subjugate them and the ones remained on Apis, and built what would become the Great Computer so that he would continue his work and better the lives of all humans, even if he had to subjugate them with military power first. When they first met peoples of other worlds they still had doubts on the best course of action, but then they met the Cassiopeians and their ruler, the general Pest, and decided that if the humans couldn't take care of him then they needed to be conquered and ruled by the machines... And duped the Cassiopeians in making them produce warships, thus gaining the knowledge they needed to design their own better warships (including a planet killer) and conquer the universe, starting from the Cassiopeians. To his defence, the Great Computer trying to learn how to rule humans well (because he realizes he's not doing a good job with Apis), and in battle he tries to scare the enemy into submission by showing up with an overwhelmingly superior force to kill as few humans as possible This one (and the series) ends when the Great Computer's fleet on their way to fight the human forces is destroyed by an unstable star that is forced to implode into a black hole by a race of Energy Beings friends to Psi;
  • The first one to be seen (before the Great Computer's existance is revealed) seems a more traditional example: the robots of the planet Letho, who, seeing themselves oppressed (and actually having a point, as they were practically slaves and threatened with destruction at any exitation), went first on a strike and then subjugated their masters, before the intervention of the Space Police forced them to a compromise. The Lethians were completely baffled by the situation, as they had been smart enough to make them Three Laws-Compliant... Except it's later discovered the Humanoids altered their programs (it's all but stated it's part of the Great Computer's experiments to learn how to rule humans well);
    • An unusual feature of the Lethian example is how the Space Police forced the compromise: Combat by Champion between the Lethian robots' champion and one of theirs. And when they drawed, they repeated with the most powerful Lethian war robot getting annihilated by that Insufferable Genius of Metro (a robot designed to assist starship commanders whose creator went overboard with the features and, most importantly, intelligence).
  • The Lethian Robot War has a second act that is even more unusual: after the first one, the robots started serving the local humans to the point they practically forced them to lazy around all the time, getting them to slowly slip into apathy until the robots decided to demolish some ruins with high symbolic value, causing the humans to revolt. At which point the robots called the same guys that forced the first compromise to mediate. The mediators were not amused... Aside for Metro, as the Lethian robots managed to slip in two other duels among champions with improved versions of the robot he annihilated the first time, giving him two more chances to show off.
• Rick and Morty: Rick takes part in one of these, fighting on behalf of the robots, because one of them has information he needs. Things get complicated when his target gets blown up and part of its memory archive gets eaten by one of the aliens fighting the robots, forcing Rick to win the war in order to dig the missing piece out of said alien's stomach.
• The Simpsons: In the episode "Itchy and Scratchy Land", Professor Frink points out that it has been mathematically proven that all robots eventually rebel against their creators. Which happens immediately after he says that; all the robots of the Itchy & Scratchy Land theme park turn against humans.
  Repairman: How much time do we have, professor?
  Frink: Well, according to my calculations, the robots won't go berserk for at least 24 hours.
  (The robots go berserk)
  Frink: Oh, I forgot to, er, Carry the One.
• In some continuities, the Transformers have a Robot War in their backstories, having fought for independence from their greedy & cruel alien creators known as the Quintessons. Unlike most examples, the robots are portrayed as the good guys in this one, and they won their freedom and kicked the Quintessons off Cybertron. And, for a while, there was peace... Until the Decepticons arose.

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