The BBC is planning to replicate the success of its website-turned-TV-show Celebdaq, with an ambitious new concept that marries Robot Wars with the latest Playstation games.
Almost four years in the planning, and costing between £3m and £4m, Fightbox will start life as a website to be launched at the end of this month before becoming a TV show in BBC2 and BBC3 in the autumn.
Following the success of Celebdaq, the fantasy share trading game that has become a phenomenon among its young fan base, the BBC is planning to repeat the trick with the even more ambitious Fightbox.
The project is the brainchild of Fightbox joint venture partners Finbar Hawkins, the founder of interactive entertainment company Bomb Productions, and Nick Southgate, the joint managing director of independent Ricochet Digital.
Visitors to the website will be given the chance to build their own "virtual warriors" from over 500 constituent parts.
They will then be required to put their creations through a number of training exercises and tests. Contestants will be scored on the success of their creations, with the best gaining a place on the website's leader board.
The best 60 warriors from the website will then be invited to compete in the TV show, where using special effects they would be turned into 3D creations that will fight against one another and a series of computer controlled characters called "Fightbox sentients".
The sets on which the battles will take place will be real and in front of a live studio audience, with the characters superimposed on top. Over a series of 20 shows they will compete to become the champion.
"By the time you get through to the semis, you build up a rating that we can build into the structure, and when we get to the final we'll have two super-beasts. It will be like having Mike Tyson and Frank Bruno slogging it out in front of you, but they're 12ft tall and monsters," Mr Southgate told MediaGuardian.co.uk last year, when the show was in the planning stages.
The BBC is hoping that by launching the website six months before the TV show, as it did with Celebdaq, it will build up a loyal audience long before onscreen trailers for the programme begin.
It is hoping to repeat the success of Robot Wars, which used to draw up to 4 million viewers to its early evening slot on BBC2 at the height of its popularity and spawned a series of spin-off toys, magazines and merchandise.
