Croquet X Machina took place in Nevada's Black Rock Desert on the Saturday before Labor Day, 1987. Ya Gotta Regatta was held two years later.

Marshall Lyons and John Bogard created the events, which directly lead to Burning Man being held in Black Rock Desert. Lyons, 34 at the time of the first gathering, came up with the idea of Croquet X Machina following a freak car accident. The accident didn’t physically injure him, but left him badly shaken. He underwent several months of talk therapy to overcome the mental trauma. During this period he had a vivid dream of trucks colliding with huge balls in the desert.

For the project he teamed with his friend John Bogard, a sculptor living near Gerlach, NV close to Black Rock desert. Together they covered commercial indoor-exercise balls with fabric and painted them to resemble croquet balls.

The event not only received local media coverage, it also was written up in Sports Illustrated:

Croquet X Machina was an enormous motorized six-way croquet match. Beneath the hazy desert sky, on the hard-pan of a great prehistoric lake bed, a motley and dilapidated fleet of trucks smashed brightly colored balls nearly six feet in diameter through 15-foot-high wickets over a course approximately 1,100 feet long. Instead of wielding small wooden mallets, the players used their trucks to advance the balls on long shots. Short shots, rather than being taken with the traditional, genteel between-the-legs stroke, were executed by phalanxes of screaming yeomen wielding a kind of plywood-and-metal battering ram. Possibly for the first time in croquet history, wind was a major factor, as the huge balls showed a disconcerting tendency to become airborne. In the end, though, the game aroused the same emotions as traditional croquet: anger, triumph, humiliation and unseemly gloating. ~Wicked Wickets Out West

Participants, mostly friends of Lyons and Bogard's, paid $50 to play; they were also responsible for expenses and transportation to Black Rock.

A roommate of P Segal attended the event and told P of it. She, along with Kevin Evans, Dawn Stott and Cynthia Kolnick, visited Black Rock Desert on Labor Day weekend in 1989 to attend Ya Gotta Regatta. Everyone was required to participate in the event by creating something that could move in the wind: P and her group created a four post bed wind machine. Jerry James, who built the first Man with Larry Harvey, also attended the event. He had seen a videotape of the giant croquet event held on the playa.

After attending Ya Gotta Regatta, Kevin Evans decided to host a Cacophony Society event over labor day 1990 at Black Rock desert, calling the event Zone Trip #4. When the 1990 Burn on Baker Beach was halted by police, P, Evans and John Law suggested to Larry Harvey and Jerry James that they bring the Man to their event in the desert. After several meetings in P’s group home at 1907 Golden Gate, it was agreed the Man would top off a weekend of desert events, and the first Burning Man at Black Rock was born.