Robert Burden, an artist living in San Francisco, has an affinity for immortalizing his favorite childhood action figures as gigantic oil paintings that makes them seem larger than life. His latest piece, The Autobot, which gives Optimus Prime the glory he so readily deserves, took over 1,000 hours to complete. And…

Say what you will about the robot designs in the Michael Bay Transformers movies, they make for one bad-ass costume when someone puts an incredible amount of detail into it.

Recently, Gizmodo had a chance to go out to the Transformers HQ at Hasbro's home office outside of Providence, Rhode Island. We got to see how the classic toys are designed from the ground up, as well as the workshop where early prototypes for all of Hasbro's toys are put together. It was a pretty great time.

Have you tried to put together a Transformer lately? Without an instruction booklet, you stand a better chance of dismantling a nuclear warhead than making Optimus look like Prime, instead of a 16-wheeler with a robot head for a butt. That wasn't always the case.

Designing toys takes sketching and planning and imagining, sure. But what's even more impressive is the actual making—still a much more industrial and craftsmanlike process than you'd imagine. It requires, essentially, a whole factory condensed into a few rooms of Hasbro's headquarters outside of Providence, Rhode…

Transformers. There's maybe no more iconic toy, especially if you're a child of the 80s and 90s. And while the memories of making them shapeshift are indelible, the process of actually building one from scratch is far more involved (or exactly as involved, if you spent your entire childhood dreaming of this) as you'd…

Have you seen our peek into how Transformers are brought to the world? Well, that's one way that the design process happens. The other way is a new poll Hasbro's got, which lets fans decide everything about the new toy. Autobot or Decepticon, what its vehicle mode looks like, or if he's a jerk robot who everyone hates…

This house in the San Juan Islands of Washington hides itself in nature and reveals its transformer abilities depending on the day. There are floor to ceiling glass walls that can be exposed. Or can be made to be completely open. There is an extendable deck. There is a bathroom roof that can be raised away. Hell,…

If you're not a Transformers fan, you'd be excused if you didn't know exactly who Metroplex is. After some comprehensive research, we've figured out he's really tall and holds Optimus in his hand a lot. Oh, also, he's a new gigantic 24-inch transformer—the biggest ever made.

All these modern-day kids have iPad and iPod touch apps to learn the alphabet. My kindergarten class had a box of these Alphabet Robots for our grimey, snot-ridden hands to play with. With just one or two minor adjustments, a letter of the alphabet suddenly transformed into an adorable little robot creature. This was…