The Critter Crunch is a table top combat robot competition that takes place annually at the MileHiCon science fiction convention.
The competition was proposed by the Denver Mad Scientists club and organized by member Bill Llewellin.
[1] In the months before the 1987 convention the club produced a set of rules which were distributed without copyright restriction, allowing other organizations use or extend them for their own competitions.
There were several competitors including a remote control dune buggy, a mechanical device under a steel mixing bowl, and a little yellow remote control Corvette that could only go forward or backwards and turn.
By then the rules had evolved to include mention of radio controls, attacking control systems, limiting the number of operators to one, and codifying two part critters loss conditions[3]