Revisiting old games has a bigger issue than just modern technology, its that hindsight is 20/20. Knowing how the game plays can lead to unhealthy levels of design convergence, and this is particularly troublesome in any years with exploitable game mechanics. This is enhanced further when the evolution in FRC technology and COTS solutions removes technical barriers that (sometimes inadvertently) helped balance game play.
For example - 2013 full court shooters. With the design concept fully proven now and increased quantities of high power density motors and 40A breaker slots, basically every team would have the ability to launch from distance in their back pocket. Even if they didn’t fully optimize for the full court shot (namely by placing their launcher at an unblock-able height), they would certainly have the power available to launch from full range when not defended. This would lead to a game that was substantially less exciting to watch. Even at the highest levels of play, when both alliances had effective full court shooters that were allowed to set up, matches became rather stagnant for the bulk of tele-op. Two teams launching discs across the court, and the rest of their alliance partners taking just enough discs to ensure they would deplete their supply and/or hunting out missed discs on the floor. With even more full court shooters, that issue would be exacerbated further. Having robots actually move around the field is a fairly important part of making FRC exciting to watch.
Other examples include ball deflectors in 2010, bounce-back passes in 2014, and can grabbers in 2015. And those can grabbers lead to the other natural risk - “arms race” challenges like the can race in 2015 and the minibots in 2011 (which, granted, had their own closed ecosystem of parts that FRC teams already pushed to the limit).
That being said, the one game I would be interested in re-trying with modern FRC technology would be 2005. There would have to be some modifications to the game to bring it up to modern standards (bumpers and frame perimeter extension limits at the very minimum, but likely also updates to the loading station/human player and autonomous challenges as well).
No amount of COTS or technology development would make this a likely outcome.
The COTS explosion and relaxed motor limits would undoubtedly increase the amount of teams that could reach level 2 or level 3 individually, but climbing together in 2013 was an incredibly difficult challenge beyond just the technical scope of climbing. Due to the shape of the pyramid being, well, a pyramid - there was less room at the top of the pyramid (both in terms of the length of the bars but also the interior area of the pyramid) than the bottom. That made fitting multiple robots at level 3 a logistical nightmare. And, unlike 2022’s traversal climb challenge, you had to be fully above the previous rung (and contact all the rungs in order) to be credited with a level 3 climb in 2013. So that removes the ability to use vertical spacing to fit multiple robots at the same climb level. Essentially, the only viable strategy to achieve multiple level 3 climbs in 2013 was to climb on the exterior of the pyramid, like 1114 or 118’s reveal video (a feature that didn’t make it onto their competition bot).
Exterior pyramid climbing only magnified an existing logistical challenge of the pyramid - how the heck do you test it at home? The biggest challenge of any pyramid climb beyond level 1 was figuring out how to construct and store an at-home version of the pyramid that could function to test these higher level climbs at a team’s shop. It was a large, cumbersome, and expensive field element that basically required a dedicated practice/storage space that could be used, and the team drawing version was lackluster AND didn’t provide proper simulation of the exterior of the pyramid. As you can see in both the 1114 and 118 videos, they had full-size, field-accurate, welded pyramids to develop their climbs on. That’s something that the vast majority of teams are not going to have consistent access to, even if a vendor stepped up to provide it to teams (and I don’t want to think about that cost).
