For me, it'll take quite a bit to ever surpass
FIRST Team 148's Breakaway reveal video.
For those who weren't around in 2010, it's important to understand and appreciate not just the video itself, which is very well done, but the context in which it was released. The 2010 build season was an ugly one, due to the extreme amount of snow many areas of the country received, but more importantly, the game. The game rules severely limited means to control the soccer balls (no more than 3" into the frame perimeter), and presented enough brand new "grand challenges" (kicking, hanging, suspending). A very large number of teams basically accepted the idea that the game was intended to prevent robots from gaining proper control of the balls, and to simply "dribble" them like real soccer. Teams that refused to accept this limitation faced a build season with a nasty prototyping challenge that I don't think FIRST has surpassed since. The only footage, and presumably for most teams, the only results, were loose "dribblers" which spun the ball backwards into the robot and only really worked at slow speeds in ideal conditions, and suction systems which created a death grip, but required pinpoint accuracy to acquire a ball.
And then 148 posts their video. It was already a great piece of work, with the detailed photo log of an intense prototyping process, the tease at the thunderchickens collaboration, and the beautiful as always Robowranglers sheet metal work. Drops mind blow #1 with the first articulating drive of the modern era and the reveal of the Nonadrive. And then, the shot at 1:46 of the robot accelerating into a ball, reversing, with the ball stuck to the front like glue, dropped the jaws of the entire FIRST community. It was simply on another plane of performance from what the majority of us had experienced, providing pure functionality seen as impossible to achieve.
And it wasn't done yet. It was
also the first reveal video of the year to feature a vertical post hang, yet another paradigm shift for many teams.
Many videos have matched it's quality in recent years, but nothing has touched it in terms of making teams realize that they needed to up their game. It was simply orders of magnitude above what we thought was possible.