The Arctibot Evolution

In March of 2000, I conceived this combiner team as a response to the fact that the Autobots have so relatively few of them compared to the Decepticons. In the U.S. TV series, the Decepticons have five over only three Autobot teams -- and if we include other continuities, the imbalance is even more pronounced -- so I thought it would be nice not only to even the score a bit, but to introduce a polar group as well.

That seemed like maybe the last sort of unexplored habitat for a combiner team:

The Constructicons / Infrastructural Engineering
The Stunticons / The Road
The Aerialbots / The Sky
The Combaticons / The Battlefield
The Protectobots / Infrastructural Protection
The Predacons / The Jungle
The Terrorcons / Anywhere!
The Technobots / Outer Space

And from the Japanese continuity:

The Seacons / The Ocean

Possibly a mountain team would be in order, too?

While designing the Arctibot constituents, I discovered that someone had already invented an "Arcticon" team, one of whose members bore the name of BLIZZARD, my first (and perhaps too obvious) choice for WHITEOUT. Another Arcticon was called SNOWCONE, which also very much resembled STORMCONE, STORM CENTER's initial moniker. Of all the names I am most pleased with WIND CHILL. I still feel that is a good and strong leader type name.

There is actually an additional iteration of five of them (all but AVALANCHE) that was done in the winter of 2001, but those changes are so minor as to be close to undetectable, so I decided to omit them.

Each Arctibot will be described more fully under their individual postings. It is quite enjoyable to design personalities as well as the way they look and try to come up with a workable whole; a fully realized character. It must have been a lot of fun working on the original characters back in the day!