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MARQUE CORNBLATT, THE CO-CREATOR OF GAME OF DRONES, KNOWS HOW TO GET YOUR ATTENTION. His contests, both indoor and outdoor, feature drone pilots going to battle. Cornblatt also creates popular videos, including an entertaining clip with a set of torture tests for a drone. First, he flew the drone into a glass windowpane, then let it free fall from 400 feet and crash to the ground. And most absurdly, the drone was the target for shotgun practice; his YouTube video, “Shotgun vs. Drone” has more than a million views.

Before he got into drones, Cornblatt had a video robot named Sparky that he brought to the first Bay Area Maker Faire. Each year, he improved Sparky, transforming it from an analog to a digital telepresence robot. “As a maker, I’d throw out last year’s technology and start with new technology,” he says. Sparky decreased from 300 pounds to about 6.

Cornblatt’s craziest creation came next, the project he called WaterBoy and BucketHead. “For Burning Man, I wanted to come up with something that was as absurd as possible for the deep desert,” he says. He wanted to seal himself in a suit filled with water, like the opposite of a diving bell. “I connected to people who had professional expertise in special effects and building wetsuits. I said: ‘Here’s what I’m trying to make.’ They told me: ‘No you can’t do it. You’re going to die.’”

He realized the suit — the WaterBoy half of the project — was a lot like a water-bed, and he found a Bay Area waterbed manufacturer who generously agreed to make it for him. Wearing the other half, BucketHead, he looked like a man who took an oversized goldfish bowl and stuck it on his head — with the water still in it. “I felt like I was a test pilot,” he says. Cornblatt teamed up with the band OK Go at Maker Faire, and Damian Kulash went onstage in both WaterBoy and BucketHead, singing a song underwater, a truly remarkable performance.

Cornblatt came to drones through RC cars and planes. “I’m easily bored and I’m always looking for something to overcome it,” He says. He started getting together with Justin Gray and other inventors in Oakland to “smash our toys together.” Eventually, this became a weekly gathering they called Flight Club, and they began crashing drones on purpose. “I didn’t want to fly drones by myself,” says Cornblatt.

“The first thing we learned from setting out to crash drones was that commercial drones were super fragile and the parts were expensive,” he says. He wanted to figure out how to make the airframe for drones more rugged. With co-founder Eli D’Elia, he launched a Kickstarter promising “to build an airframe that didn’t need to be repaired.” Cornblatt knew that he could produce good videos to help him raise the money and to gain momentum for what later became “Game of Drones.”

During a contest, drones battle inside of cages and knock out their opponents, incapacitating them so that they cannot be quickly repaired by their pilots and returned to flight. Because some pilots were more interested in acrobatics than battles, he began adding competitions for pilots to demonstrate new tricks. Now Game of Drones includes racing where pilots wear FPV goggles. (See “Formula FPV,” page 24.) They are racing a new breed of drone — “tiny, fast, and angry like hornets.”

Cornblatt, a race car enthusiast and an SCCA-trained driver, believes a competition like the Game of Drones is an important way to push the limits of a technology. Henry Ford was one of the early organizers of auto racing, staging match races and attempting to set land-speed records. His goal was the kind of publicity that would make automobiles popular — he wanted people to talk about what cars could do. When Ford started out racing, nobody thought of themselves as race car drivers. He had to recruit a competitive cyclist, Barney Oldfield, who was completely unfamiliar with the controls of a car. Nonetheless, by driving a one-mile track in one minute in a Ford vehicle, Oldfield was the first person to drive a car at 60 mph. Racing made Ford and his fortune.

Cornblatt wants people to get excited about drones, and he thinks that racing and other aerial games will do that. Events like Game of Drones are creating a new category of competition, much like the X Games did for skateboards and BMX bikes, developing a distinctive language of tricks and maneuvers, as well as promoting the broader interest in drones by more people — even among those who don’t fly them.

BY DALE DOUGHERTY, founder and Executive Chairman of Maker Media.