Spider Tank

aka: Spider Mech

Spider tank, spider tank, does whatever a spider tank does...

Artemus Gordon: So, what does Loveless have? [notices factory complex] Well... he has his own city.
[Out of nowhere, a giant mechanical spider shows up]
Jim West: He has an 80-foot tarantula.
Artemus Gordon: Yes, well... I was coming to that.

— Wild Wild West

Where Big Creepy-Crawlies meets mecha. A subset of Real Robot, with a decidedly non-humanoid appearance. These are often used by sci-fi series that want to use giant robots, but feel that humanoid shapes won't fit the setting. Even if the setting doesn't use giant robots, and sometimes even if it does, smaller Spider Tanks may be found as robotic drones. In series that use giant humanoid robots as well as spider tanks, you can bet that the humanoid robots will often be more agile than their multi-legged counterparts, despite the fact that the opposite logically would be true.

The form has a few advantages over the human shape:

• The hull can be lower to the ground and thus less of a target;
• Your classic Spider Tank spreads its legs out more, making the vehicle more stable overall and allows it to traverse terrain that would give wheeled vehicles considerable trouble.
• Increased points of contact with the ground also increase stability — the human shape is a lot more precariously balanced than it seems, and bipedal robots in real life tend to have serious balance issues. Giving a machine multiple legs helps it keep its footing.
• Each leg required only three joins, each of which only needed to swing in one direction - making spider tank legs MUCH simpler and easier to maintain than complex joints of humanoid mecha.

These help it cheat that pesky Square-Cube Law that gives giant humanoids considerable engineering problems. Of course many creators then go ahead and give it feet that taper to a point in order to make it look more like a real arthropod, which ruins any overall improvement in the ground-pressure department. You can't escape the Rule of Cool, it seems.

While wheels are faster and more efficient and tracks are best on a soft ground (it's hard to beat one big support area), spider legs can navigate extremely rough terrains and are more reliable because the vehicle can stand or even walk after losing a leg or two. Since "extremely rough terrains" include rubble blasted all over streets or hedgehogs made of rails, and "losing a leg" includes little gifts from artillery, you see why an excavator isn't the only potential application. In fiction this means the spider design is most attractive for settings supposed to be gritty and realistic.

Depending on the size of the Spider Tank, it may or may not have wheels on its feet. Caterpillar tracks are also common. If the Spider Tank is under 4 meters (roughly 12.5 feet) tall you can expect it to have wheels or tracks on its feet; if larger, you can expect it won't. It will probably have pointy feet instead. Despite the name, Spider Tanks rarely have eight legs. Four is the most common, and some have six. It's usually guaranteed that they'll have an even number of legs, though.

Please note, Spider Tanks are not tanks designed to look like spiders; they are simply tanks that walk like spiders (or scorpions). If you encounter a giant robot shaped like an insect or arachnoid it's more likely that they are a Ro Beast and not a true Spider Tank. In video games some Real Robot humanoid mechas occasionally have four or more legs, but still have an upper body and arms. They are also not spider tanks, as they do not fulfil the tank requirement. It's also not an arachnid version of the Snake Pit or Shark Pool.

A similar (and broader) concept is Tripods. See also Giant Spider and Giant Enemy Crab for their autonomous organic counterparts. Sub-Trope of Walking Tank and, depending on the type of Spider Tank, Animal Mecha or Starfish Robots. Contrast Tank-Tread Mecha (for machines with the lower body of a tank). The more autonomous versions may overlap with Mechanical Insects.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• AKIRA: Small, four-legged spider tanks appear to enforce martial law after Tetsuo releases Akira.
• Appleseed: Spider Gun Platforms. The fourth volume of the manga also features smaller Attack Drone robots with actual abdomens that are almost entirely made up of a minigun and its absurdly large ammo drum.
• Bubblegum Crisis: The GD-42 Battlemover, the "crab mech" piloted by Vision.
• Cyborg 009 has Monster of the Week Cyborg 0011, whose body is basically one such tank, with lasers, a cannon that shot a sticky substance and a missile that, when exploded, unleashes a neurotoxic rain.
• Dominion Tank Police has a spider tank in one episode, albeit an opponent for the more normal looking tanks of the Tank Police.
• In Fairy Tail, the true form of the ancient Reversal Magic Nirvana is the fantasy equivalent of this trope. In other words, a city-sized stone construct that walks on six legs that fires its Magic through a Wave-Motion Gun. The heroes are suitably shocked to realize this, having originally assumed Nirvana was some sort of ancient spell or even small artifact.
• In Fang of the Sun Dougram, the spider tanks are improved model of the Walking Tank Crab Gunner and Tequila Gunner. They have a lower profile, are more mobile than their predecessor, and come in two forms, a six-legged Desert Gunner and a smaller four-legged Blizzard Gunner.
• Genesis of Aquarion: In the second to last episode, we find out that the Assault Type Aquarion can assume an "Armageddon Formation" where all three vectors combine into a six-legged mech with the PSG cannon mounted on the top.
• Ghost in the Shell: Fuchikomas, Tachikomas, Uchikomas, and just about half the tanks. They all have wheels or treads on their legs, save for one example from the first movie.
  • Fuchikomas and Tachikomas have more spider-like traits than usual, being able to cling to walls and deploy wires that let them swing around or descend vertical heights. The Tachikomatic Days omake points out◊ they're like Spider-Man in tank form.
    Tachiko-Man, Tachiko-Man, doin' the things a Tachikoma can....
  • In a clever extension of this Animal Motif, Jigabachi attack helicopters resemble wasps (they rear back their abdomens to fire a minigun at their target) and are named for a type that hunts spiders.
    Tachikoma 1: [worried about an impending confrontation with several Jigabachi] So, wouldn't anti-tank helicopters be like... our natural predator?
    Tachikoma 2: Hmmm... Mister Batou, can we go home? We have upset stomachs.
    Batou: Stomachs? What stomachs?
  • One early episode features the military prototype with more of a scorpion theme. It's possessed by its designer so he can protest his parents' decision not to allow him to get a healthy body via cyborgization.
• Gundam:
  • Although the Adzam Mobile Armor in Mobile Suit Gundam is more like a hovering gun platform with four landing gear, the Zamza-Zah from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny actually has fully jointed legs (with retractable crab claws and BFGs in the feet), though it also spends most of its appearances flying. Destiny also has the Ghells-Ghe, which is an insect-like armor with the upper body of a mobile suit mounted centaur-like on the front.
  • A brief scene of a heavily modified Ball known as Polypodball appears in Gundam Build Divers. This Ball variant is somewhat octopoid, with a round central hull and four legs at the corners in place of the thruster packs that would normally be mounted. However, it also retains the Ball's manipulator pinchers pointing forward, giving it a look rather similar to a crab.
• Gyo: Infected fish (and later, other animals and even humans) ride around on nightmarish metal walking machines constructed by the Death Stench bacteria. The tips of their spindly metal legs are incredibly sharp, being able to badly wound anyone touched by them, and if a vacant walking machine is touched by something, it impales its victim with a set of spikes and tubes to use the unfortunate soul as its latest 'energy source'. One of the first organisms to appear attached to such a walking machine is a Great White Shark (a shark tank, if you will), which appears to be conscious enough to still menace and attack anyone caught in its path.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: The Type IV Gadget Drones. Fast and deadly Mecha-Mooks with six sickle-legs that slice through Barrier Jackets and Knight Armors like butter. The manga also showed experimental versions of Type III Gadget Drones (those big ball things) that were six-legged walking tanks.
• Metallic Rouge: One of the weapons used by the Usurpers in the Great Offscreen War were four-legged autonomous war machines humans nicknamed "Cylinder Heads". They're fast and armed with clawed legs, retractible arms, and a powerful rotary laser cannon.
• Patlabor: A couple of spider mechs appear, including one for traffic police, one that's supposed to be a luxury civilian vehicle, and a third one being a mobile command post used by United Nations forces. All three of them have wheels on the ends of their "legs".
• Project A-Ko: The alien forces use a spider-tank that also doubles as an aerial fighter.
• In Soul Eater, this is what Baba Yaga Castle (no actual relationship to Baba Yaga, it's the headquarters of the witch Arachne) can become: a giant spider castle tank.
• In Sound of the Sky, the 1121st Platoon has a Takemikazuchi dating to the Old Era. It's an impressive machine, able to scale buildings. It spends most of the series in pieces, but Noël manages to fix it in time to save the day. To put that feat in perspective, it's a supermodern piece of precision machinery, and she repairs it with the equivalent of a mix of 19th Century and 1930s technology. Gadgeteer Genius indeed.
  • The flashbacks show that both armies use large numbers of spider tanks, but their capabilities are far less than the Takemikazuchi's, in imitation of which they appear to have been built.
  • All the tanks seen in action are spider-tanks, but the Takemicaduchi is the most advanced tank ever built, a piece of Lost Technology.
• Time Bokan: All mecha are animal-shaped, from the insect-shaped robots used by the heroes to the assorted robots used by the Skull Trio.
• Zoids: There are a number of Scorpion-, Crab- and Insect-based Zoids, notably the Death Stinger.

Pinball

• Foo Fighters (2023): Many of the Overlord's personally-controlled robots have multiple spider-like legs, ranging from three to six depending on the mode.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The Phyrexian Walker is a war machine resembling a giant metal spider.
  • The Hedron Rover is by all appearances a spider tank made out of rock.
  • The Demolition Stomper is a large, rusted vehicle moving around on six jointed legs.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has the literally-named Launcher Spider. A few other mechanical arachnids appear like Steel Scorpion, although this card actually poisons the monster, destroying it in a few turns.

Comic Books

• In Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, Lex Luthor's underwater secret lab is a giant mecha supported by spider legs.
• In the Ravencroft miniseries, as one of Wilson Fisk's cronies hired to Ravencroft asylum, Mac Gargan is given an Alister Smythe-designed bionic, long-legged, arachnoid wheelchair that has a tail cannon with the usual arsenal of Scorpion weaponry.

Fan Works

• Aeon Entelechy Evangelion: The Nephilim Tsuchigumos replace the useless canon CthulhuTech Nephilim. And yes, they are a Shout-Out to Tachikomas.
• Exoria: Anansi. Twenty-five meters tall. Carries ten chain guns and dozens of anti-tank top-attack missiles. Runs at three hundred kilometers per hour. Impervious to most conventional weapons. Can jump.
• Left Beyond: The Omega spend a significant amount of resources developing spider tanks... which turn out to be nigh useless, since the Millennial Earth has no mountains.
• Nobody Dies: Go-Kun, but more classically the Reego (or some of their bodies, at least). Tres even has most of the semi-sentient giant spiders in Australia worshiping her. (Long story.)
• Turn of the Tides: The preview for the Bloodbath of the Burning Plains reveals Sergeant Johnson will pilot a Scarab.
• Voyages of the Wild Sea Horse: Dyna's steam-powered life-support exo-armor is described as a barrel-shaped, upright torso mounted on eight piston-powered mechanical spider's legs. For an added arachnid aesthetic, her primary right arm ends in a piston-powered scorpion-like pincer with a retractile chainsaw mounted to it.

Films — Animation

• Beauty and the Beast: Once Belle has agreed to become the Beast's prisoner in exchange for the freedom of her father Maurice, the Beast drags Maurice to an old palanquin of the "small carriage-like box on bearing poles" variety. Having been touched by the same magic as the rest of the castle, once the Beast has placed Maurice inside and ordered it to take him back to the village, the palanquin's poles curl into spidery legs and it rapidly scuttles off through the forest, carrying the protesting Maurice with it.
• In The Boxtrolls, Snatcher builds one, with the help of captured boxtrolls, to break into the boxtroll lair and round up the rest.
• Howl's Moving Castle: The titular castle is something of a Steampunk version, moving around on four jointed legs.
• The Incredibles: Syndrome's Omnidroid. Early versions had two wheels and two arms, but at some point they were mixed together and just kept increasing from there until you get the five- and six- legged, building-sized monstrosities that are actually fought.
• Megamind: In Megamind: The Button of Doom, having become defender of Metrocity after the end of the movie, Megamind auctions off his evil weapons, but Minion is fond of the Spider-bot and hides it instead. Then a Humongous Mecha attacks and Megamind has nothing to fend it off with; its spider-like nature comes in useful for a Colossus Climb.
• Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva has the entire castle be built upon a huge excavator.
• Steamboy: A walking steam tank is shown for only one scene, being used by the O'Hara foundation when fighting the British military's treaded tanks.
• Strike Witches: The beginning of the movie features an entire legion of Neuroi Spider Tanks, one of few land-based Neuroi featured in the series.
• Toy Story: One of the rebuilt toys is a toy car with legs instead of wheels. The baby doll / erector set hybrid is also Spider Tank shaped.
• War of the Worlds: Goliath is a 2012 Malaysian movie that's a follow-up to the novel by H. G. Wells. Set in 1914, humans had reverse-engineered the Martian Tripods to create their own Battle Tripods, which carry mostly human weapons such as an 88mm cannon, machine guns, a few rockets plus they also have a heat ray. World War I is about to be fought with these Battle Tripods plus some lesser Diesel Punk technologies until the Martians invade again.

Films — Live-Action

• In Avatar: The Way of Water, the whaling crew of the RDA uses crab-shaped amphibious submarines that have pincers and move on land like crabs would.
• Comic Book The Movie: Kevin Smith relates (based on his experience with Superman Returns above, then called Superman Lives) how the director of the movie Hammill's character is making a featurette on (with the ulterior motive to gain control of the production to prevent Adaptation Displacement) wanted him to write a scene where the hero fights a giant mechanical spider. At the turning point of the film his realization that the movie must be stopped is conveyed by having him obtain a copy of the shooting script and discovering the words "Scene 37: The Giant Mechanical Spider".
• Doctor Who: One of the rejected designs for The Movie has a spider Dalek that can unfold its side casing into eight legs. Great, now even stairs won't stop them ^note the Daleks would later get around the stair problem another way. "EL-E-VATE!". Spider Daleks made it into at least one of the novels, both in Dalek-sized and tank-sized varieties.
• Ghost in the Shell (2017). After his assassins prove ineffectual against Section 9, Cutter uses a missile-firing spider tank against Major and Kuze. Unlike the one in the anime, it's a remotely-piloted drone.
• In the climactic scene of I Am Mother, a robot version is brought up by the Killer Robots to burn its way into the bunker.
• Justice League sees Batman briefly employing a tank with spider-like legs called "the Knightcrawler" to use against Steppenwolf in the tunnels. In fact, this vehicle can even scale walls.
• Minority Report has small drone robots for police searches.
• Robot Wars (1993) has the last remaining Humongous Mecha in the world called MRAS-2 that looks like a scorpion (the sting is a powerful laser cannon). At the start of the film, its purpose is to ferry tourists in the passenger module on its back. Then it's hijacked by a representative of the Eastern Alliance in order to make war. The hero (the pilot of the MRAS-2) manages to find another Humongous Mecha, which was thought destroyed in the war. The MEGA-1 is humanoid in form, though. Oh, did we mention that it was made by the same people who brought us Robot Jox (it was even hyped as a sequel).
• Star Wars: The AT-TE and (large and small) Spider Droids from the prequel trilogy. The AT-TE is a squat tank-like machine that moves on six spread-out legs for stability and can climb up vertical cliffs. The spider droids are spherical robots with four jointed legs arranged equidistantly around their midsections and powerful laser guns mounted on their fronts (the small ones) or undersides (the large ones), making them essentially ambulatory cannon emplacements.
  • The original trilogy's AT-ATs sort of qualify based on leg count, but ultimately they're less Spider Tanks and more Indricotherium Tanks. Elephant tanks, rather, as the AT-AT leg design and movements were based on elephants walking.
  • In the Expanded Universe, the MT-AT — designed specifically for mountainous terrain — is distinctly more spiderlike in its design.
• Terminator Genisys: Skynet has these defending the base where it's hiding the time machine. They are able to be deployed from the flying Hunter Killers and are quite formidable — only the destruction of Skynet stops John and Reese from being killed by one.
• Wild Wild West: The giant Steampunk spider built and used by Dr. Arliss Loveless.
  • Producer Jon Peters repeatedly insisted a similar spider tank show up in early drafts of what later became Superman Returns, as wittily recounted here by scriptwriter Kevin Smith. It also shows up in Superman: Doomsday, and an animated Smith observes it and calls it "lame".
  • Jon Peters' obsession with the vehicle goes beyond just those two movies. The most egregious example might be his attempt to fit the contraption into the proposed cinematic adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (1989) series.

Literature

• 86 EIGHTY-SIX has these as one of the centerpieces of the setting.
• The Bull's Hour features the nine-legged SDF robots utilized by the main cast. These multipods can do basically whatever the plot needs them to do, probably justified by the fact this is an expedition to an unknown and possibly hostile world, coupled with the ability of the Earth's mighty scientific-industry complex to actually load a small robot with every feature the designers could imagine. Unfortunately, their lack of an anti-naivete warning system still left half of the Dark Flame's crew outright dead, and the rest traumatized for the comparatively short rest of their lives — not that the impregnable encounter suits or the commander's dreaded Inferno training helped much, either.
• Done literally in the third Burton & Swinburne Series book, Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon. During the World War, British scientists raised giant daddy longlegs and had them killed. They then motorized and armored the corpses before finally adding gun emplacements to make a powerful tank out of them.
• Dinotopia: First Flight, set during the golden age of the mech-loving civilization of Poseidos, has a variety of spider-like strutters. Unlike most other examples, they actually have flat, padded feet.
• A civilian version, more properly described as an Insect Car, occurs in Die entflohene Blume ("The Escapee Flower", 1910) by Kurd Laßwitz. Here the Martian girl Ha and her brother Hei reach a remote desert valley by using a six-legged Kletter-Auto ("climbing-car") which by the use of suction-devices in its feet can even climb up sheer cliffs "like a wasp".
• For civilian purposes in K. W. Jeter's Fiendish Schemes, steampunk technology has led to the Walking Lighthouse. These are lighthouses with a retractable crabwalker base that allows a lighthouse to move to a new location before deploying back to being a normal lighthouse. The reason for this invention is that it turns out the oceans are Genius Loci and can move or change shape, making stationary lighthouses almost useless.
• Heavy Object: Deconstructed. Some Objects like the Water Strider have their hovering devices at the end of several long legs. The fact that the legs are extremely maintenance-intensive is a plot point: Qwenthur is able to destroy Water Strider by sabotaging one of the parts that have to be replaced after every sortie.
• In the Jedi Academy Trilogy, a group of Imperial loyalists breaks out the MT-AT (Mountainous Terrain Armored Transport), an eight-legged spider-tank designed for high and rough terrain. Each leg has its own laser cannon.
• KonoSuba: The Mobile Fortress Destroyer is literally a colossal robot spider that destroys everything in its path.
• Leviathan: Most motorized vehicles use legs instead of wheels on the assumption that they are either more efficient, powerful, or adaptable. In truth, the sheer complexity of a walking vehicle would would have a staggering cost and inefficiency compared to wheels.
  • The Land Frigates are essentially warships mounted on six or eight mechanical legs. A Scorpion Tank belonging to the Ottomans shows up in Behemoth.
  • At one point in the first volume, Alek considers alternative propulsion and immediately rejects tracks as being fit only for peasant tractors.
• In Ollie's Odyssey, Zozo makes one of these out of parts of the various rides around the amusement park.
• In Neal Asher's The Owner trilogy, Spiderguns are the ultimate in squad suppression. This agile 8-legged armored arsenal has a dual-barreled machine gun turret on each leg for the basic model (other weapons can be added on). While the guns are small caliber, they fire at 1000 rounds per minute at 4000 meters per second and all 8 guns can fix on the same target for More Dakka Alpha Strike. And the ammo it uses is Depleted Uranium beads and every spidergun leg magazine has 2000 of these. One spidergun can easily wipe out dozens of enemy infantry in seconds.
• Rebuild World: This is one of the most common monster designs, ranging from small enough to crawl over Akira's Cool Car, to Kaiju. Like the other monsters, all of which are The Remnant of Neglectful Precursors called the Old World, they devour metal to resupply, grow, and reproduce. Additionally, the Super-Soldier Haruka is able to use Voluntary Shapeshifting to split herself into many of these, with spiders being her Animal Motif. All of the above fantastic abilities come from Nanomachines.
• Takeshi Kovacs: Altered Carbon and Broken Angels don't feature Spider Tanks directly, but they are mentioned by various characters. They (and various other robotic war-machines) finally make an appearance in Woken Furies.
• Valhalla: Sasha's entire fleet is made up of walking tanks with four legs and a walking aircraft carrier with eight. These are given purpose in the novel; they need legs to tiptoe across forests that wheeled vehicles couldn't enter. One tank is modified to have eight legs partly in reference to Sleipnir, Odin's eight-legged horse in Norse Mythology.
• The War Against the Chtorr has four-meter-high Vigilante-class military spiders. Unfortunately, they're not that smart, which causes the hero any number of problems.
• In addition to the Tripod Terror, the Martians from The War of the Worlds have the Handling Machine, described as a squat, metallic spider with huge articulated claws. The Martians used it for construction purposes.

Live-Action Television

• The Book of Boba Fett. In the climatic battle of Season One, our anti-heroes seem to have the Pyke Syndicate soldiers on the run, when a couple of Scorpenek Annihilator droids protected by their own forcefields turn up. Even though Boba turns up riding a giant rancor to fight them, they still take a lot of killing.
• Enlisted: Lt. Shneeberger pilots a robot spider in one episode.
• Stargate SG-1: The Replicators initially take the shape of small metallic spiders. In later episodes, they combine to form larger insectoid shapes, fully fulfilling this trope.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: Four-legged ("quad") BattleMechs are a distinct minority, but they do exist. Their main in-game drawbacks are their lack of arms and more rigid firing arcs (partly due to lack of a twistable upper torso) — in particular, the construction rules don't allow for weapons covering their side arcs at all, thus creating significant blind spots. On the plus side, they get minor maneuvering benefits and are less likely to fall down as long as all legs are still working. The first two Quad mechs, the Scorpion and Goliath, are based off Dougram's Blizzard Gunner and Crab Gunner respectively.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Apparatus of Kwalish, an item from the first edition of the game which returns as a standard (if expensive) magic item in 4th edition, is a barrel in which a person can hide himself. Multiple levers allow one to turn the barrel into a Spider Tank (complete with flamethrowers) and control it. It's primarily meant for underwater use, complete with glowing "eyes" with continual light cast on them and retractable claws in the front. Although the item would be invaluable as a Spider Tank if found at low levels, its value is such that (barring deliberate placement by a GM) it can usually only be found in treasures long after the characters would have no use for its combat or amphibious capabilities.
  • Lolth uses a giant version of one of these as her headquarters in Queen of the Demonweb Pits.
  • Spelljammer: The neogi use arachnid-shaped spaceships, some of which are well-armored enough to rate as spacegoing Spider Tanks.
  • The retriever is a construct (robot-like animated object) from the Abyss, used to perform certain missions for the demon lords. There is speculation that it was modeled after the spider-like Abyssal predators known as bebiliths.
• Dystopian Wars loves this — not only do the Empire of the Blazing Sun have one (the Taka-Ishi Heavy Walker), but the Covenant of Antrartica's small and medium tanks are quadroped walkers as well. Their Landship however is far from a Spider, but also worthy of inclusion here.
• GURPS Ultratech has the Exo-Spider.
• Iron Kingdoms: Though not strictly tanks, the Leviathan and Harrower helljacks from Warmachine qualify well enough for this trope. There's also a Cygnar Battle Engine called the Storm Strider, a four-legged machine that blasts its targets with lightning.
• Lancer: The SSC Death's Head and Swallowtail frames fit this trope, each having several pairs of legs and an upper body that resembles a turret more than a humanoid torso. They both even feature small manipulator arms that resemble pedipalps.
• Marvel Super Heroes supplement Uncanny X-Men boxed set "Adventure Book". In chapter 2 "Lunch Break", while the PCs are eating lunch with the Beast they're attacked by a tank that has a circular body and eight spider-like legs with six 12-foot long Combat Tentacles. It turns out to be a Secret Test arranged by the Beast to find out if the PCs are worthy to be superheroes.
• Mobile Frame Zero has the Ijad, who favour a low, rounded, quadrupedal structure since their most common combat hosts are quadrupeds, although they're not shy about using humanoid mechs when the pilot has a human partner. The corebook has LEGO assembly instructions for the generic modular Scrambler and the assault/recon Suzerain, both of them insectoid quadrupeds.
• Paranoia: The MTV (Multi-Terrain Vehicle) in the sample adventure for the second edition. Perhaps unique in being based on a submarine with legs bolted in place. (Incidentally, the manual control system consists of six joysticks, and is about as reliable and intuitive as learning to play the piano with your knees. The MTV's bot brain can handle it just fine, but of course it conks out after a while...)^note You doubt the efficiency of Friend Computer's creations? Please report to the nearest termination booth, on charges of Treason. Have a nice day, citizen. Happiness is mandatory.
• In addition to inheriting some of the examples from D&D, Pathfinder includes the powerful Annihilator Robots, found in and around the massive crashed starship in Numeria. Equipped with chain guns and a Plasma Cannon, they are formidable adversaries, though thankfully rare.
• Rifts has both Spider and Scorpion Skull-Walkers for the Coalition States — essentially giant metal skulls on six jointed legs (yes, we know spiders have eight legs) — and the four-legged Bug and Land Crab APCs for the New German Republic.
• In Rocket Age the Nazis are the only ones to have been able to reverse engineer Ancient Martian war walkers. Several war walkers fit this trope, but the best examples are the Sturmschreiter, an eight legged behemoth, and the Panzerschreiter Skorpion, an agile six legged contraption built for city fighting.
• Starblazer Adventures, campaign setting Mindjammer. The enemy Venu forces have attack droids that are spider-shaped robots. They can climb walls like a spider and are adept in zero G environments. They are armed with a Protein Disruptor Cannon and protected by primitive force fields.
• Traveller Classic supplement RM-90-08 Imperial Armed Forces Vehicle Guide Set Number 8 - Exotic. The XM-125 is a tank that moves using its eight legs. The legs allow it to move over almost any type of solid terrain, including crossing ditches, fording rivers, passing over obstacles and climbing slopes of up to 60°.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Chaos faction loves this trope. There's the Defiler (demon possessed mech with four legs and two clawed arms), the Brass Scorpion, a giant mechanical demonic scorpion used by the forces of Khorne, and the Soul Grinder, which is basically a demon bolted onto a Defiler's legs. Also note the new "Blood Slaughterer". Their newest codex also gave them the Venomcrawler, a spider-formed daemon engine.
  • The 5th edition Necrons Codex introduces the Triarch Stalker, although it's only six-legged.
  • The Imperium has access to the Adeptus Mechanicus Onager Dunecrawler, which has optional pads to place on the feet to get around the "pointy ballerina feet" issue.

Toys

• The HEXBUG Battle Spider is a weaponised version of the HEXBUG Spider, a remote controlled six-legged spider tank, you can pilot it and take down other spiders with its LED laser gun. There's also the Battle Tarantula, an eight-legged spider tank based on the Strandbeest.
• BIONICLE: The Swamp Strider and Skopio XV-1. The latter was also capable of transforming into a regular tank, but with pincers in place of a turret. Its "turret" was the scorpion-like tail it had. In lore, the Skopio XV-1 is based on, and named after, a species of living Spider Tanks.
• The original 1980's Masters of the Universe toyline had the "Spydor" walking vehicle, and TV commercials for the toy were produced.
• Mega Bloks had the "WARRIORS: FUTURE FORCE" line as its contribution to the block-based robot genre. Its four-legged design is known as J-227 Quadwalker and features a primary 'master' spider-mech with a pilot and a hordette of autonomous spider drones.

Video Games

• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura has mechanical spiders of a highly realistic 8-legged sort, which you can find in a hostile rips-you-apart disposition or build yourself in a rips-other-people-apart disposition. A variant of the chassis comes with a healing kit instead of rending mandibles.
• Armored Core: Quad-legged mechs have been an staple since the beginning. They occupy a middle ground between bipeds and tank treads in their weight and carrying capacity, and they can be surprisingly fast while they're at it. Red Rum of Armored Core: For Answer is a good example of a quad NEXT being a pain to deal with. The only thing that keeps them from being perfect is they require more energy than either bipeds or treads. In the earlier games, they (along with treads) also have the ability to fire powerful shoulder guns without using Human Plus augmentations.
• Aztec Wars: The Aztecs have two varieties of the Spider, one with a giant bow, one equipped with a flamethrower. The former is the most expensive unit in the game; it can kill any infantry unit with one shot, but is insanely slow. It is mentioned that, since the Aztecs consider using the wheel a blasphemy against the sacred symbol of the Sun, they're limited to either this or Hopping Machines when it comes to war machinery.
• Battalion Ghosts has six-legged Spider Tanks which can move over mountains, the only units that can do that, aside from the Commandos.
• Battle Clash: Antonov's Standing Tank Ivan, minus the mobility part.
• Battle Engine Aquila has these for both armies. The Aquilla itself is also a Transforming Mecha
• City of Heroes: Arachnos is a villain group that is all things spiders and so the developers couldn't pass up an opportunity to put in anatomically correct (8-legged) spider-bots of all sizes. Players in City of Villains can summon them if they have the Bane Spider or Mace Mastery power sets.
  • The best one qualifying for this trope has to be the Arachnos Heavy, the biggest and baddest spider-bot of them all that's the size of a tank.
  • Even bigger than the Arachnos Heavy is the Jade Spider, originally just a plot device from the comic, now a monster in its own right. And it's psychic.
• Civilization: Beyond Earth: Factions following the Supremacy affinity tend to use these as their late game units. For example, take a look at the SABR self-propelled artillery unit◊. Or the ANGEL ultimate unit◊.
• Command & Conquer:
  • Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight:
    • The most direct example is a tank called the Spider Tank, which is a small tank which fires a laser, and can burrow into the ground to move around unseen. It even creates a laser "web" when in close proximity to other Spider tanks, which damages units which get caught in the web.
    • Kane's Wrath introduces the Eradicator Hexapod. Granted, it's missing a pair of legs, but still it's gigantic freakin' bug. Also, the scrin have the gun walker, a much weaker and smaller Spider Tank.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 has the Terror Drone, which is a small machine that kills infantry in one hit, takes down tanks in seconds, and is very bloody fast. It returns in RA3, but with the ability to swim.
  • Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:
    • The Soviet Stingray is a boat armed with Tesla Coils that turns into a six-legged vehicle when it gets on land, however Stingrays move very slowly in that mode.
    • Similarly, the Soviet Sickle and Reapers use rickety legs to move. It also lets them jump up/down ledges or onto enemies, repeatedly for the Sickle and once for the Reaper, turning it into an immobile turret (but crushing anything the Reaper lands on, including MCVs).
• Contra:
  • Super C has the "Babalu Destructoid Mechanism", the Mini-Boss of the third stage. It doesn't have the planet-destroying power that was stated in the manual, thankfully. It returns in the first stage of Contra: Shattered Soldier.
  • Hard Corps: Uprising has a variation of this called Arachne. Heck, its Japanese name, Asagumo, means "morning spider".
• In Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, one of Die Spinne's superweapons is a giant, six-legged machine armed with a massive flamethrower.
• Cyberbots: Three Variant Armor use 4 insectoid legs — Jackal, Cyclone and Talantula.
• In DC Universe Online, almost all types of Brainiac's robotic minions are roughly humanoid or spider tanks.
• Destiny: The Fallen field lumbering six-legged spider-tanks armed with a chin-based rotary cannon, a turret with a massive long-barrel cannon and four-tube rocket pod, a close-range electrical knockback pulse, and the ability to deploy Shank Attack Drones for support. They're extremely tough, but you can force them to expose their weak spot by destroying their leg armor. It's also possible to destroy the turret-mounted rocket pod on some versions.
• Desert Breaker have black, four-legged vehicles designed based on the classic spider-tanks as a recurring enemy, with their sole attack being three extendable barbs attacked on their fronts capable of lashing out at great speed.
• Deus Ex has both the small, annoying kind, and the absolutely huge, terrifying kind. Both shoot electricity that, on top of inflicting actual damage, also drains the energy you use for your augmentations.
• Doom:
  • Doom: The boss of Episodes 3 and 4 is the Spider Mastermind, a large robotic monster whose organic brain is controlling the mechanical rest of the anatomy. Its weapon is a super-chaingun.
  • Doom II: The Arachnotrons are demonic spiders with mechanical lower halves with four legs and either a plasmagun (for the Arachnotrons). Though they are actually giant brains (with faces) atop mechanical spider-legged platforms.
  • Doom³ has friendly spider drones in the form of Sentry Bots.
• In Dynamite Headdy, Maruyama/Trouble Bruin's final mech is Spider Phantom/Super Finagler, which balances on two spiderlike legs.
• EarthBound (1994): In his boss appearances, Porky Minch favors heavily-armored life support tanks mounted on mechanical spider legs as his weapon/vehicle/way-of-not-dying-messily of choice. It's effective, to say the least.
• Earth Defense Force: The EDF 4.1 Shadow of New Despair re-release adds a spider tank called the "Depth Crawler" The "Depth Crawler" is a four legged tank variant piloted by players and armed with a variety of heavy weapons. It takes the spider part of spider tank quite literally with the "Depth Crawler" able to move up walls and across ceilings just like a spider. Just like the jumping spiders in the game it is also capable of leaping around.
• In 8Bit Killer, among the enemies are cannons that walk back and forth on four robotic legs, shooting the player on sight.
• The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Skyrim both have the Dwemer-built Spider Centurion Mecha-Mooks, which are Fun Size Spider Tanks that appear in Dwemer ruins.
• Factorio has the Spidertron, an eight-legged vehicle that can walk over any obstacles other than large bodies of water, which also features thicker armor than the game's tank, an equipment grid (for Shields and defensive lasers, among other things), and 4 auto-targeting rocket launchers.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3: Operation: Anchorage has Spider Drones, essentially scuttling land mines used by the Chinese Army. Their only form of attack is to skitter up to you and explode.
  • Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel has a Scurry Robot. They weren't made for battle, but ended up used as makeshift Goddamned Bats, and they can bury themselves for an ambush. Their Walking Tank brothers are much bigger and meaner.
• Final Fantasy: Final Fantasy VIII has X-ATM092, a spidery robot that is exceptionally difficult to kill with anything less than a ship-mounted machine gun.
• Fracture features one called the Dreadnaught which, as it's name suggests, is the size of a battleship.
• Cloud Cutter have a gigantic spider mecha the size of a skyscraper as the Final Boss, in a level appropriately called "Spider". It resembles a bunch of turrets, missile launchers, and a massive laser cannon on four spider-like legs stomping all over the ruins of some war-torn Eastern European city as it spam attacks at you.
• Front Mission features several enemy Commander mechs of this sort. Some of them could be obtained by completing special missions and/or completing the game.
• Gear Head: Arachnoids, heavy gun-carriers but not particularly maneuverable.
• Ghost in the Shell, the original PlayStation game based on the anime, have you piloting the Fuchikoma from the show. Several of your enemies are machines on robotic spider-legs as well, including a number of bosses (the first being a King Mook version of the regular spider-tank mooks).
• Gradius has the Shadow Dancer and variations in most of its final or penultimate stages, and in the third stage of V. In many of its appearances, it is invincible and can only be dodged as it passes. In some home console releases (including V), however, you're able to destroy them instead of just dodging.
• Gunstar Heroes has Pink and Black ride in legged contraptions.
• Halo:
  • The most iconic examples in the franchise are the Scarabs, building-sized insectoid walkers used by the Covenant. It should be noted they're not so much vehicles as they are giant suits of armor worn by Lekgolo colonies.
  • Halo Wars has an even more powerful Scarab variant referred to simply as "the Super Scarab". There's also the Locust, a smaller and more traditionally-piloted four-legged mecha.
  • Halo Wars 2 adds the Blisterback, a walking missile battery that can also transform into a plasma-spewing air unit. If you choose Colony as your commander, you can also build Skitterers, which are Mini-Mecha versions of this trope piloted by Lekgolo.
  • The Type-47A Scarabs that appear in Halo 2 and its Anniversary remake are a Subversion of this; despite being able to easily blow through most UNSC defenses, they're actually dedicated excavation equipment, unlike the more combat-oriented Type-47B Scarabs seen in the rest of the series. As such, they're much larger and more cumbersome than the Type-47Bs, to the point where the Master Chief is able to board and destroy one by letting it get trapped in a canal — they're clearly not designed to traverse narrow city streets. The Covenant only brought them along to Earth to help dig up the Ark portal, as they weren't even expecting the planet to have any humans.
• Hangzo have it's first boss being a red-and-silver spider mecha, whose legs ends in wheels. It's upper body however is a Cyber Cyclops.
• Hearthstone has a card simply called Spider Tank. The tank is operated by a gnome.
• Horizon: Faro Robots in general have a more insectoid design to distinguish them from HEPHAESTUS-designed Machines, but the one that best fits this trope is the Khopesh, also known as the Deathbringer. Khopeshes are effectively the Faro Swarm's infantry, and each of them is a story-tall walking tower of destruction loaded to the gills with deadly weaponry.
• Horn of the Abyss has Automatons, tier 4 creatures of Factory town. They are six-legged, steam-powered mechs, outfitted with a Self-Destruct Mechanism.
• Iron Grip features several of these, including the Fahrong Confederation's Recluse◊, Warweaver◊ and Widow◊ "arachs". The Widow is quite literally a gigantic self-propelled artillery piece.
• In Iron Harvest, Saxony fields some of these in its army.
• Jak and Daxter: The Dark Terraformer from Jak 3 in its mobile stage, as well as the Krimzon Blast Bots. The Baron also brings one into the Tomb of Mar in Jak II: Renegade.
• Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds: In addition to the iconic tripods and spider-like handling machines from the novel, the Martians employ a plethora of new machines with anything between two and six legs.
• Jet Set Radio: The Terror Drone is piloted by Captain Hayashi and can launch grenades and shoot heatwaves. It even has police sirens.
• Killzone: Liberation has Cobar's spider tank, which also spawns smaller spiderbots.
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition has the GAB-25 Vital Suit which can transform between this and Drill Tank modes. An even larger version of the GAB-25 serves as a boss enemy in one of the later levels, and Lost Planet 2 takes it one step farther by making it gattai with the GAN-34 for a boss fight. The feat can be reproduced in both the campaign and multiplayer modes by two players, and doing so nets you an achievement and a title called "And I'll Form the Head!". However, when used by the players, the resulting machine is more of a traditional tank, unlike the boss.
• In Low G Man, the Spider vehicle lacks guns, but has the power to kill enemies by walking into them and can reverse gravity to walk on the ceiling.
• Machines: Wired For War has military and nonmilitary variants; the four-legged Reaper, six-legged Commandant, and the helpless crab-walking six- legged Locator.
• Mario Party 7: The minigame Hop-O-Matic 4000 has two teams of characters riding each a massive four-legged vehicle across a street. In each team, the player on the left controls the back and front legs on their side, while the player on the right does the same with the nack and front legs on theirs. A character has to press a specific button marked on the screen to move a leg, and then it's the other character who has to press another button to move another leg. Once the characters move all four legs across the turns, the vehicle performs a large leap forward; they then repeat the sequence to prepare the next leap. If a player presses the wrong button, they'll waste time. The first team to take their vehicle to the goal line wins.
• Mass Effect 3 features Destroyer-model Reapers, which are "merely" 160 meters tall, as opposed to their two kilometer-long, cuttlefish-shaped brethren. However, their defenses still are frighteningly powerful, even being resistant (though not invulnerable) to orbital bombardment.
• MechWarrior 2 has a bonus 'mech available via a cheat code, appropriately named "Tarantula", that fits this. It's a bit of a hack, in that the engine isn't natively capable of handling four-legged mechs, so the fore legs of the Tarantula are actually its arms. Which can cause bizarre damage effects: shoot off one of the hind legs and you get a three-legged Tarantula unable to move, but shoot both fore legs and it'll still cheerfully hop about on just the hind ones. And if you shoot off both fore legs and one hind leg, it'll stay there suspended and unmoving on... one leg.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man Legends: Tron Bonne seems to like this concept. She attacks you in the Feldynaught in the first game and the Yakuto Krabbe (Basically the Feldynaught with huge crab pincers) in the sequel.
  • Mega Man X8 has a huge crab-like Mechaniloid as the boss of the opening stage.
• Metal Fatigue has the murderously powerful scorpion tanks as part of the precursor arsenal. Most tanks and other ground vehicles are little more than fodder in the face of Combots, even poorly-equipped ones. A squad or platoon of Hedoth scorpion tanks can handily put a serious dent in an equivalent number of Combots.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has this for the penultimate boss battle with Metal Gear EXCELSUS, armed with massive HF blades mirroring those of the protagonist Raiden.
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, a variation of the Metal Gear (known as the RAXA, and its mass-production model, the ICBMG) uses four legs instead of the usual two, possibly invoking this trope.
• Metal Max has the Gehenna Walker, originally fought as an optional bounty. Beating it means, that your team can capture it and add it to your fleet of tanks.
• Metal Warriors has one of these hidden in the first level; it can throw energy webs, use its head-like limb as a melee weapon, and climb on ceilings and walls.
• Metal Wolf Chaos: A giant mechanical spider, armed with super energy wave phaser, is eventually defeated by the President's Mini-Mecha shooting it full of holes. There are also smaller spider robots present on its level, some of which are armed with machine guns and cannons and some of which use nasty Suicide Attack, which damages shields pretty heavily.
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has the Quad units that populate the Sanctuary Fortress (and the Dark Quads in the Ing Hive), as well as the King Mook Quadraxis that serves as the area boss. They all have main bodies and detachable head units, each requiring different tactics to defeat.
• Nintendo Wars: The Neotank is a spider-shaped tank and the second most powerful land unit in the Advance Wars series, after the Megatank. With wheels on its feet, it is also the fastest tank in the game, offering it a significant advantage over the Megatank.
• In Nuclear Throne, one of the enemies in the Frozen City is a spider tank robot. They fire sweeping waves of bullets preceded by a Laser Sight and a few seconds of windup. They may rarely spawn as a golden version, which has a different sweeping pattern on their barrage, no windup, and missiles.
• Operation: Matriarchy has the Mechanical Golem enemies, spider-tanks with human bodies grafted on their tops. Despite their size, they still retain human heads and shoulders, giving them appearance of a Tiny-Headed Behemoth.
• Operation Wolf Returns: First Mission has a spider-mecha serve as the Mission 5 boss, being the secret weapon General Viper was building.
• ParaWorld has a Bamboo Technology version of the scorpion tank variant. It's a close-combat machine that can also harvest resources. There is also, later, a Steampunk spider tank.
• Pikmin 2: The Man-at-Legs is a four-legged Cyborg Arachnorb fused with a machine gun. Olimar believes that said gun actually controls the spider.
• P.N.03: The final boss's second form somewhat resembles a scorpion. Sonnenblume (the first boss), the One-Winged Angel form of Orchidee 2.0, and some of the mooks are also spider-like.
• Pokémon has Metagross, a four-legged pseudo-legendary Spider Hover Tank with Psychic Powers.
• Professor Layton and the Last Specter has the villain run a factory that makes these. The finale involves defeating one.
• Quake IV has the cyborg-zombie enemy, the Strogg, strongly favor the spider tank design. Stream Protectors, Harvesters, and the Makron itself all go around on spidery legs despite the existence of floaty technology, which you'd think would be better — which is particularly odd since, once the Makron's legs are damaged at the end of the game, its upper body starts hovering. The harvesters are actually techno-organic, as indicated by their shrieking sound.
• Raiden II: The first boss battle is against a duo of four-legged spider tanks while the first boss of Raiden IV is a single, six-legged tank instead. However, the twin spider tanks return in that game's fourth stage.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando: The Spider-Bot is a remote-controlled four-legged drone that Ratchet can use to scout areas, activate otherwise inaccessible switches, and blow up to attack enemies. Once upgraded it becomes the Tank-Bot, which adds a turret containing a machine gun and grenade launcher for more offensive capability. It's a rather situational weapon either way due to Ratchet being unable to move while it's active and if he takes damage you lose control of the drone.
  • Ratchet: Deadlocked: The Landstalker is a four-legged player vehicle variety.
  • Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart: Glitch is an adorable AI that takes the form of a tiny spider-like robot. She can be placed into computers to act as an anti-virus program, attacking hostile viruses infecting the system.
• RayStorm's first boss, Pendragon, transforms between a large tank and a spider walker. Another spider tank in the series is Pro-Tor from RayCrisis.
• Razing Storm pits you against one of these in the third stage. It's really persistent, and it uses a Macross Missile Massacre when defeated in a last ditch attempt to destroy your characters.
• Red Faction: Armageddon has two spider tanks, the Scout Walker and Mantis. Red Faction II has those annoying exploding spider bots.
• Resistance: The Chimera have two classes of spider tank: Stalkers and Goliaths. The former are about the size and strength of a real-life tank, appear often in the series, and can actually be piloted by humans if they get the chance. Goliaths, however, are serious business. They're the Chimera's siege engines, the size of skyscrapers, and you're only in a position to destroy two in the whole series; far more often you're avoiding them or dealing with damage they've caused.
• Ring of Red: 4-Leg AFWs, which are dedicated (they're one of the two units - the other being the Light AFW - with no close-quarters weaponry) artillery platforms. They take inspiration from self-propelled howitzers (in keeping with the game's Walking Tank Real Robot Genre aesthetic), and must lock down into an Anchored Attack Stance to fire their huge cannons.
• Rise of Legends: The Clock Punk Vinci faction has Clockwork Spiders. They also have the Land Leviathan, which is essentially a steam-powered clockwork missile-launching subterranean Scorpion Tank the size of a small city.
• Robocalypse: Both Spyder Scout and Viper the Sniper are these, but human-sized.
• Shadow Complex has you fight these several different times as minibosses or (during the final boss fight) as as regular enemies. In one such fight you can't even damage the tank, as it's clinging to the wall high above you (beyond grenade range, and it's bulletproof) — you have to trick it into repeatedly bursting water mains until it can't climb any higher above the rising flood, causing the tank to become the toaster in a huge Electrified Bathtub.
• Silent Bomber has the Fire Ox boss. Its four legs have wheels to skate fast and fully rotate in circle to turn the heavily armed head.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Dr. Eggman uses a number of machines like this (the Egg Dealer from Shadow the Hedgehog immediately comes to mind).
• StarCraft:
  • Most of the Protoss ground mechanical units are some variation on the Spider Tank. These include the Dragoon, the Immortal and Stalker (upgraded dragoons), and the Colossus. (The sole exception — the Reaver — moves like a mechanical caterpillar rather than a spider.) The Colossus isn't a spider tank so much as it's a 4-legged tripod. The War of the Worlds influence is very obvious when you think about it.
  • Also the Terran Siege Tank, which deploys stabilizers in siege mode but moves on treads. Spider and Widow Mines are spider... well, mines (they burrow and then rush you before detonating (spider) /launch a missile (widow))... not so much tanks.
• Star Fox: Dancing Insector. The level also has spider walker mooks.
• Star Ocean: Till the End of Time: One of the enemies in Moon Base are spider mechs. And they are also Demonic Spiders, due to their very deadly attacks. They also occupy a huge portion of walkable space, so it's very hard to avoid fighting them.
• Star Trek Online gives us these as part of the Vaadwaur ground forces. They aren't seen very often, but when they do appear, they're some of the strongest ground enemies the Vaadwaur have.
• Star Wars: Republic Commando: The small spider droids from Attack of the Clones show up as mini-bosses.
• Steambot Chronicles features spider legs as a potential upgrade to the player's bot.
• Steel Assault have red, mechanical spider-mechs as recurring enemies in the city stage. Armed with dual flamethrowers to boot!
• Strider:
  • Strider (Arcade) has the Mosqueman, a four-legged robot walker, although officially it is described as an "octopus"-shaped robot.
  • Strider (2014) brings an updated sort-of model called the Brainwalker, which is powered by the brains of captured civilians.
  • Director Kouchi Yotsui's Spiritual Sequel, Cannon Dancer, has a smaller, more agile spider robot which jumps out of the way every time it is hit.
• Sundered: Hysteria is a mountain-sized cyborg of a spider tank. Its organic component is a cancerous blob of green flesh that used to be a human being, whose secretions leak from the spider tank’s joints and the barrel of its Wave-Motion Gun. It has the ability to sprout gun turrets from its legs, and to fuse its front legs into a bludgeon that it uses to smash human-sized opponents — like the player character — into paste.
• Supreme Commander: Countless units, including the Aeon's Harbinger and Sprite Striker. The Cybran have many such units, including The Mantis, The Fire Beetle and The Brick. Two of the Cybran experimental units qualify: The Monkeylord Experimental Spiderbot; and the Megalith: Experimental Megabot (see picture). The Cybran's Tech 2 Destroyer transforms into a giant spider tank to walk on land. The UEF, Aeon and Cybran unit design philosophies are basically "Tanks", "Hover Tanks" and "Spider Tanks" respectively.
  • Even more bizarrely, one of the Cybran Spider Tanks is a mobile factory that lays eggs which hatch into units.
  • In the sequel, nearly all Cybran land units are spider tanks, and all naval units (barring the giant squid submarine) can become spider-boats and walk on land.
• SWAT Police have small, spider-like robots on four legs as recurring enemies, and a boss which is a giant, fast-moving spider tank which incorporates designs of crabs in it as well.
• Thunder Force V has Armed Armament Arm (A3), a spider mech that transforms into a land vehicle, then an aerial robot when damaged enough the first two times. After the third time, its gone for good. The sequel had Barbaric Berserk Beast, an obvious expy of the above mentioned.
• Time Crisis: The PlayStation port features an infantry fighting vehicle modified with legs instead of wheels on its 'Kantaris Deal' side story, as the boss of the slowest possible route.
• Total Annihilation: Arm's Spider and Invader, and Core's Roach. The Spider actually has spider neurons in its brain to coordinate the 8 legs.
• Touhou Project: In the prologue of Touhou Kanjuden ~ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, Sanae mentions a metallic spider machine that appeared on mountain, that apparently reminds her of Curiosity. The machine purifies everything it passes, leaving no life in its wake (but otherwise leaving the landscape intact). It is implied to be from the Lunarians.
• Transformers (2004): The first PS2 game (the good, non-movie one) has non-transforming spider tanks as a regular enemy. They have shielded legs, and are pretty dangerous, having powerful (but easily dodged) weapons and no weak points.
• Transformers: Fall of Cybertron has two types: a tiny sniper model called the Wall Crawler, which scuttles around well above players looking for heads to shoot, and the much larger Marauder model which is covered in mortar launchers and beam cannons, acting as a Mini-Boss when encountered.
• Turok: A Spider Tank is a boss in the 2008 Continuity Reboot game.
• Universe at War: The Hierarchy in Universe At War: Earth Assault uses a lot of Spider Tanks. in fact, their bases are giant Spider Tanks.
• Unreal Tournament III has the Scavenger, a four-legged tank that can transform into a high-speed ball. Also, the Darkwalker.
• Vanquish has the KNRB-0 Argus, which is the game's first boss, and later fought as a pair.
• Wall World revolves around this. You pilot a robospider from weak spot to weak spot in the vast Wall, mining as many blocks, resources, and relics as you can and searching out hidden nooks full of helpful upgrades and extra weaponry while repelling periodic Zyrex assaults.
• In Warframe, the Grineer use Thumpers, massive four-legged mechs that roam the Plains of Eidolon and attack using cannons and a piledriver that can send shockwaves with each pulse, hence the name. Despite their bulk, they're surprisingly agile, being able to leap large distances, charge enemies at full speed, and will circle around to prevent the weak points in their legs from being attacked.
• Warlords Battlecry 2 has the Dark Dwarf's Firebombs, small (and, again, fast) eight-legged machines that suicide when attacked or when they attack.
• Wasteland: Honorable mention goes to the dreaded Scorpitron. Of course, at least in the original game, it's basically depicted as an Ogre with a scorpion tail attached, so it doesn't quite fit into the trope smoothly.
• Watch_Dogs has the digital trip "Spider Tank", where you take control of a giant spider tank, complete with mini-guns and rockets, to terrorize the people of Chicago. In the sequel the Chicagoans built one of their own. You hack it and destroy stuff.
• Wildcat Gun Machine has the Mind of the Beast, a mecha on spider-legs completely taken over by the alien growth, as an Organic Technology take on the trope. If you deefeat it however, the growth dissolve, allowing you to hijack the spider-mech and use it to kick ass in the next area.
• World of Warcraft: Gnomes sometimes use small Steampunk versions of these. The Expansion Pack Battle for Azeroth added the Mechagnomes who have bigger and more refined spider-like vehicles, and allows the players to gain them as mounts.
• Xenosaga: Spider Drones show up as mooks early.
• Zone of the Enders: "Enemy Walking Tank: SPIDER."

Web Animation

• In gen:LOCK, the heavy infantry for the Union are black and gold spider tanks armed with grappling hooks, twin machine guns, and a powerful rotary cannon.
• RWBY: The third trailer included a small Spider Tank amongst many humanoid robotic Mooks. The tank puts up a much better fight than the mooks, and the Action Girl protagonist can't even scratch it; she can only buy time for her partner to prepare his One-Hit Kill attack.

Webcomics

• A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe: While attacking the base of the Followers of the Icosahedron, the Everyman discovers that the tank that he had created earlier in the comic has come into their possession and augmented with a set of jointed legs.
• Girl Genius : The "war stompers" of the Knights of Jove are house-sized brass tanks, each mounted on five jointed, spider-like legs.
• Homestuck:
  • As part of its extensive array of patterns and themes, each central character has some sort of futuristic vehicle connected to one of their personal motifs — for instance, Rose's struggles with her alcoholic mother are reflected by a rocket made to look like a champagne cork. The vehicle corresponding to Cancer-themed troll Karkat scuttles around on eight jointed legs.
  • One of the war machines briefly seen during Jack's rampage in [S] Jack: Ascend resembles a fortified tower mounted of four insect-like legs.
• Never Mind the Gap: A bio-weapon war took place some time before the story proper begins, and spider tanks carrying dangerous anti-bio-weapon chemicals played some role in it. In the comic, a bunch of kids accidentally stumble across a buried, broken-down spider tank; one of the characters is filled with nerdy glee at the prospect of restoring it.
• Pacific Rim: Amara: Garza hijacks Ada's mech-race with Arachnaut, a robotic spider cobbled from Jaeger parts.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-278 ("A Large Mechanical Spider") is a giant mechanical vehicle in the shape of a spider, made of steel, iron, and banyan wood. It can be piloted by humans using mechanical controls. It is also capable of moving around on its own. It escaped in 2008, and was covered up as a performance art piece called "La Princesse". See the Real Life section below.
  • SCP-2069 ("AEGIS"). After the invading robots realized how determined the human race was to fight back, one of the war machines they created was a type of spider tank.
• Tlf Travel Alerts attempted an ill advised "Spider Tram" which worked great, until it spun a giant web and started devouring commuters. It also caused "Delays Due To Spider Tank".

Western Animation

• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: In the 3rd episode, while Chip, Dale, Monterey Jack and Zipper look for Geegaw Hackwrench in an abandoned airplane, they manage to trigger traps that were set, and run into a spider-like mecha, which turns out to have Gadget inside, who comes out to greet Monterey.
• The Dreamstone: Some of Urpgor's machines are variations of this. Perhaps the most notable being the literal Spider Tank in "The Spidermobile", to the point of being designed like a spider and even shooting web as a weapon.
• Futurama: In "A Taste of Freedom", after conquering the Earth, the Decapodians force humanity to build a crab tank — the "Mobile Opression Palace", essentially a gigantic sandcastle on six orange mechanical legs and provided with a pair of crab-like claws — to watch over their new conquest.
• Jonny Quest: In "The Robot Spy", the titular device was a globe with a single large eye set in it, with four long legs sticking out of the top. It was invulnerable to firearms up to and including a tank's main gun.
• Phineas and Ferb has Professor Poofenplotz's "Me-Mobile" from "Isabella and the Temple of Sap", a giant version of her head mounted on spider legs.
• Shadow Raiders: Planet Ice's Spider Tanks (They're called exactly that).
• The Simpsons parodies the Wild Wild West spider tank when Skinner tries to maintain realism in a Civil War re-enactment, despite the interruption from some nearby World War II veterans...
  Skinner: Tanks? Oh, this is just too inaccurate.
  [Professor Frink appears behind him in a giant robot spider.]
  Professor Frink: Well then, you're definitely not going to like my steam-powered super-spider. With the stepping and the squishing and the webs made of NYLON...
• Skyland: The MOGURA is a large spider-shaped robot that was created to drill for water on an ice-covered block. Once the water ran out, though, it needed to find more sources. As it happens, humans are largely water...
• South Park sent up the Wild Wild West Spider Tank ^note The film was competing with the South Park movie at the time, where Cartman pretends he's a rapping cowboy who has to save Salma Hayek from a big metal spider.
• Spider-Man (1967): One episode featured the world in another dimension (during the series' really weird later seasons) where an evil alien sends giant spider-shaped mechas, that shoot paralyzing/freezing rays, to attack and tear apart a human city and abduct its people to use as slave labor.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series: The Spider-Slayers (a black widow, a tarantula and a scorpion) double up as Combining Mecha. And none of them was original to the series. There have been a lot of Spider-Slayer designs in the comics.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars has the Umbaran juggernaut, a six-legged dome-shaped tank armed with a rotary cannon and employed by the Umbaran forces. This one, notably, does not walk on tip-toes — it rests on its "knuckles" instead.
• Totally Spies!: In "Spy vs Spy", the protagonists end up tied in a giant web. A large spider robot crawls over them and sprays them with a liquid material which hardens into a cocoon. Clover breaks them out with liquid nitrogen breath spray applied to the cocoons.
• Transformers: A small number of Transformers turn into giant spiders, either mechanical or organic. Tarantulas is the first and most unnerving, and his personality goes far beyond vague malevolence right on into psychosis. Scorponok in both his G1, Energon and Movie incarnations. He's closer to Tank/Scorpion hybrid than most.
  • Transformers: Animated: Shockwave normally turns into a tank, but as Longarm Prime, he actually turns into a spider crane.
  • Transformers: Cyberverse: Shockwave transforms into a spider tank. His drones resemble a miniature version of his alt-mode.
  • Sometimes even characters who don't usually have a spider tank altmode will be given one for a toy. Both Beast Wars Megatron (whose altmode is generally some variation on a dinosaur) and Transformers: Robots in Disguise Megatron (who already had like ten altmodes) got variations on this◊ toy◊, which turns into a multi-legged robot vaguely resembling the mask of a Predator.
• The Venture Bros. parodies Jonny Quest's Spider Tank with Dr. Venture's obsession over his father's Walking Eye.
• Wolverine and the X-Men (2009): The first Sentinel prototype was of a spider/scorpion form. It had some kinks to work out, like not knowing how to avoid collateral damage, and not having an off-switch.
• In Young Justice (2010), the Kroloteans have "mechs" that are Spider Tanks in all but name.

Real Life

• Actual vehicles have been built that use the motor configuration of arachnids. However, they move much slower than just using wheels.
• Big Dog (from Boston Dynamics) may not be a vehicle, but just you wait. Also LS3, the (also canceled) bigger brother.
• Speaking of walking on soft ground...the Timberjack hexapod deforester which can walk on uneven ground effectively (albeit has very slow turning) is proudly claiming that its feet cause less damage to ground when compare to a normal caterpillar. What kind of magic it use? Rubber dampers.
• And that's why the cheap robots they're designing to wander Mars are called 'spider-bots'. They only have six legs, though. And they're kinda small. And there will be a lot of them. They're cheap, after all.
• The Kabutom RX-03, which took 11 years to build, is 11 meters long, 9.5 meters wide, weighs 15 tonnes and carries up to 6 people. Admittedly, it actually has wheels underneath which bear its weight, and the legs simply push it along.
• La Princesse is a giant mechanical spider, but it's supported by a crane. The legs are just for show.
• A bunch of people at the University of Louisiana created the Cajun Crawler, which is basically a Segway only with little legs (based off of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests) instead of wheels. The result is one part Nightmare Fuel, and two parts awesome.
• NASA's ATHLETE (TOW link) project probably applies. They're six-limbed robots/transportation platforms with wheels on the end of each limb, giving them the ability to walk or roll depending on the situation. The "walking" is rather slow, and often consists of "moving the limbs in such a way that we can roll safely again," as each footfall must be human controlled; NASA is working on "autonomous footfall placement" in part to make walking faster. The end goal of the project is to create a robot to carry cargo on the Moon.
• Mondo Spider. See also on YouTube. So far, it didn't surpass human walking speed, but yes, it turns on the spot. "1,700 lbs of Mechanical Mayhem" is moved by hydraulics powered with 12hp average (30hp peak) worth of electrical motors.
• The Crabster. If build it could revolutionize undersea exploration by giving it more dexterity exploring the ocean floor and hardiness in the face of aggressive currents.
• The aptly named "walking excavators".

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