Jim Smentowski is a former BattleBots competitor based in Florida, who served as captain of Team Nightmare since 1999 and as a judge for the inaugural 2002 BattleBots IQ event.
He is best known for his heavyweight robot Nightmare, which competed since the inception of BattleBots until 2016, coming out of hiatus only for an exhibition battle. However, he also won the Giant Nut in Season 1.0 with lightweight Backlash and competed as recently as the 2019 season of BattleBots on Discovery with Breaker Box.
Smentowski was also responsible for building the Nightmare ShowBots which fight at BattleBots: Destruct-A-Thon.
For more on Jim Smentowski's time within the show, see Team Nightmare.
Outside BattleBots[]
Jim Smentowski grew up in Colorado before moving to Phoenix, Arizona to attend a technical school. He later moved back to Colorado, where he married and set up a family.
- "I grew up tinkering with electronic and mechanical stuff whenever I could get my hands and a screwdriver near them. By the time I was 11, I had taken apart nearly everything in the house to figure out how it worked. (This, of course frustrated my parents immensely, because at that age, putting things back together is not normally included in the procedure). I always had a set of tools and some project of some kind sitting unfinished in my bedroom or in the garage. This, of course, has changed little, and I still have boxes of old projects that I will someday have time to complete."
- — Jim Smentowski on his website
He lives in Bradenton, Florida with his wife and fellow Team Nightmare member Erica Smentowski, and has two sons named Nathan and Ian. Leading up to his involvement in combat robotics, Smentowski worked at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in 1995, where the late Grant Imahara also worked.[1]
In more recent years, Jim Smentowski has been self-employed, running the Robot Marketplace shop since 2002. Alongside his wife Erica, he competed in This is Fighting Robots with Wrecker, a repurposed version of his controlbot Breaker Box.