Robo Machine began in 1983 as Bandai's port of Machine Robo to the UK and Europe. Paralleling the release of Machine Men in the US and Australia, Bandai sought to be on the leading edge of the coming transformable robot toy wave. Like its parent series Machine Robo and the ill-fated US Machine Men series, Robo Machine initially designated each figure by its alternate mode. The figures were sold on blister cards and given ID numbers beginning with "RM-", often paralleling the corresponding Japanese "MR-" nubmers. Once Deluxe Machine Robo and Scalerobo figures became available, Robo Machine incorporated them as DX Robo Machines, again using the vehicle form name with the word "Robot". By this point, the US had already switched to Tonka's GoBots, with new character names and flashy art. Robo Machine was slow to follow, but eventually followed by rebranding itself as Robo Machine: GoBots.
After the rebranding, Robo Machine switched to using the Tonka character names, but still occasionally provided its own unique name for figures. Earlier toys were re-released in 1985 now bearing their GoBots names. The figures themselves looked like a hybrid of the US and Japanese lines, incorporating the additional user-applied stickers of Machine Robo, sometimes overtop of Tonka-exclusive decoes. The DX Robo Machines, initially using the Japanese decoes, evolved into Super GoBots, picking up mostly US offerings, but with an increasing number of unique variants. Like GoBots, the series expanded with a collection of other figures, as always borrowing both from Bandai Japanese-exclusive designs like the Combinators and Tonka domestic designs like Zod and the Command Center.
By 1986, Hasbro's Transformers had asserted its dominance globally, spelling the end of GoBots in the US and forcing Machine Robo to undergo a rebrand as an anime toyline corresponding to the Revenge of Cronos series. Despite subsisting into 1987 on a few remnant designs, Robo Machine could not stand on its own as Transformers had an ever-increasing presence in Europe. The European line would see a brief rebirth in 1993 as Robo Machines (note the plural) with some slightly modified re-releases and a small segment of Machine Robo's Change and Glow lineup.
