Hyper-Deuterion Gundam

Mobile Suit Gundam was developed principally by Yoshiyuki Tomino, along with a changing group of Sunrise creators who went under the collective pseudonym "Hajime Yatate".

During its conceptual phase, the series was originally titled Freedom Fighter Gunboy or simply Gunboy, because the title robot was armed with a gun and the target demographic was young boys. In the early stages of production, there were numerous references to the word freedom, such as the White Base being originally named Freedom's Fortress, the Core Fighter as the Freedom Wing, and the Gunperry named the Freedom Cruiser. The collective Yatate team combined the English word Gun with last syllable of the word Freedom, Dom, to form the word Gundom. Tomino then changed the name to the current title Gundam, suggesting that the name Gundam signifies a power wielding a gun that is strong enough to hold back enemies like a dam holds back floods.

Gundams are usually not sentient robots, but rather large, bipedal vehicles controlled by their human pilots in cockpits. Like many of the "mobile suits" appearing in the series, a Mobile Suit (the name for these vehicles, including the Gundam) is usually piloted from the torso area with a camera built into the head, transmitting the image to viewscreens in the cockpit, allowing the pilot to perceive the outside world. Some exceptions have been known to mount cockpits on other areas (Like the mobile suit's head, which is the case in the Guntank model).[1] There are sentient ones, however. In the plot of Gundam Sentinel, the computer called A.L.I.C.E. was specified to have developed its own emotion, wanting to become human at its destruction in the very end of the story. In the Story Blue Destiny, four suits (in which one of them is not a Gundam and one has a GM head with an RX-79[G] body) mounted with the EXAM system all shared a Newtype human soul inside them and can act on their own and will go berserk when meeting each other since it will be like asking a human to attack him/herself.[2] These are, however, the only canon and specified plot that contains sentient Gundams.