State Games

« Transformers Annual 1986 »
The golden age before the golden age.
A Tale from Cybertron "State Games"
Publisher	Marvel Comics
First published	September 1986
Cover date	1986
Writer	James Hill
Art	John Stokes
Editor	Sheila Cranna
Continuity	Marvel Comics continuity (Marvel UK)
Chronology	Immediately pre-Great War

The war begins...

Synopsis

Though a line of Overlords once ruled Cybertron in an Autocracy, their time is now all but at an end; only one of them remains, holding dwindling political influence in Tarn. Tensions rise on Cybertron, the result of new Transformer life being created unabated, putting increased pressure on the planet's resources. In order to combat this, the Overlord creates the Games—an inter-city gladiatorial competition put into practice to facilitate goodwill between the planet's various city-states, such as Iacon, Tarn and Vos. Unfortunately, they have the opposite effect and rivalries between the city-states boil over into outright enmities.

Megatron, a citizen of Tarn, is a successful but particularly vicious athlete. Optimus Prime is very much his equal, and the two share a somewhat acrimonious sporting rivalry. During a match between Megatron and Sunstreaker held in Tarn, Megatron cuts loose and nearly slays his opponent. Optimus intervenes, but the Overlord remains blind to Megatron's growing ambitions, and reprimands Optimus for interfering in the contest.

Meanwhile, the Vos athletic team breaks into Tarn's power generator with the purpose of planting a bomb, destroying Tarn, while at the same time leaving evidence to suggest that it was Iacon who was responsible. The resulting war would decimate Tarn and Iacon, leaving Vos (ruled by a criminal syndicate headed by Starscream) the most powerful city on Cybertron. However, the team is caught in the act by a lowly second-engineer. The bomb still goes off, but not before Vos's guilt becomes known. Tarn soon becomes a barren warzone as its conflict with the enemy city escalates. Though Xaaron of Iacon attempts to convince his fellow councilors to send their forces over as peace-keepers, his request is shot down by High Councillor Traachon. The latter is convinced that should Iacon refrain from getting involved, the war will not affect them. Further, he believes that it might be in Iacon's best interest if the other two city states annihilate one another.

"The only water in the forest is the river."

Back in Tarn, the hostilities traps the athletes and the Autobot Overlord in what is now the frontline of an inter-city war. The Autobot Overlord is ancient and frail, and requires frequent care. Megatron and Optimus Prime accompany the Overlord's two bodyguards, Ravage and Nightstalker in attempting to return the Overlord to Iacon through the battlefield. However, the fighting becomes too intense, and Optimus Prime leaves the other three with the Overlord to go to Iacon alone and gather reinforcements. After Prime's departure, a small force of shock troops, the remainder of Tarn's defunct military, attacks. Initially, Megatron holds them off with a fusion cannon he recovers from a dead soldier, but even this powerful new weapon is not enough to win the day. In order to protect his master, Nightstalker sacrifices himself in a suicide explosion, leaving only Ravage and Megatron to stand guard. Megatron, seeing that Cybertron is on the cusp of a major political change, leaves the Overlord to die, with Ravage following suit.

When the war between Vos and Tarn finishes, Megatron convinces the survivors to unite as a new faction, the Decepticons, against Iacon. He tells the gathered crowd that Iacon could have easily intervened to prevent the war. As they once had done in the gladiatorial arena, Megatron's admirers chant his name, signaling the beginning of his rise to power.

Featured Characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Autobots	Decepticons	Others
Sunstreaker (2) Overlord (3) Nightstalker (4) Optimus Prime (6) Xaaron (8) Tomaandi (9) Traachon (10)	Megatron (1) Ravage (5)	Tornado (7)

Notes

Continuity notes

• "State Games" is a prequel to, and was was directly inspired by, the earlier story "And There Shall Come...a Leader!", published in the previous year's annual, sharing a variation of its "Tales from Cybertron" title prefix. A slight retcon of its events is performed, however; "And There Shall Come..." established that Megatron and Optimus did not know each other prior to the war, while "State Games" makes them fellow gladiators acquainted with one another.
• At this point in real-world Transformers history, the "Prime" part of Optimus Prime's name held no special meaning, essentially serving only as his "surname." Later stories would retcon it into being the title of the Autobot who bears the Creation Matrix, making its use in this story, when he is nothing but an Iaconian athlete, notably anomalous.
• The Vos team includes Tornado, who previously appeared in issue #15 of the weekly Transformers comic.
• Iaconian council members Xaaron, Tomaandi, and Traachon all previously appeared in "And There Shall Come...a Leader!" Just a few weeks after the annual's publication, Xaaron would make the jump to appearing in the weekly comic, beginning with issue #78.
• Shockwave and Starscream are mentioned as leaders of Tarn and Vos, respectively. This seems to be an implicit explanation for why these two Decepticons in particular keep trying to take command from Megatron in the present day: they used to be in charge (with Megatron evening being Shockwave's subject!) and want that back.

Real-life references

• The terrorist attack on the Games was a reference to the events surrounding the 1972 Munich Olympics.
• Hill describes the "spark" for the gladiatorial setting as coming from Optimus Prime and Megatron's fight on Sherman Dam in the Generation 1 cartoon episode "More than Meets the Eye, Part 2".

Artwork and technical errors

• Megatron and Sunstreaker are described in the text as wearing masks. In the accompanying illustration of the scene, however, presumably so we can clearly identify Megatron, he is not wearing one. We can't see Sunstreaker's face, but his whole head is off-model, lacking his distinctive "ear" protrusions.
• Megatron should be wearing his newly-acquired fusion cannon in the final illustration of the story, but it is absent.

Other trivia

• Contrary to the annual prose stories' tendency to be throwaway, forgotten tales, "State Games" would go on to become hugely influential on future media. The concept of the Decepticons having their origins in gladiatorial games and of political tensions on a declining Cybertron were revisited in both the Dreamwave and IDW Publishing comic books, as well as in the Aligned continuity family. IDW's Megatron Origin, in particular, is in many ways a retelling of "State Games", using combat games (albeit illegal, rather than state-sanction), economic depression, and anger towards the politics of Iacon as major plot points.
• James Hill pitched an adaptation of "State Games" as a comic to IDW Publishing in 2007. The pitch is included in The Transformers Classics UK Volume 2.

Cover

• Transformers Annual 1986: Prime and other early Transformers, by Barry Kitson.

• 
  Transformers Annual 1986

Reprints

• 
  The Transformers Classics UK Volume 2 (IDW Publishing, 2012)