Has Hasbro ever explained where he was? He wasn't on Cybertron apparently, if he was, he would have had more of a role in Beast Machines than a holgram in Iacon . I'm not talking about being 4,000 years in the past and in stasis lock either , but in the "current time" as you will.
Had Transtech actually been put into production, I'm sure that series would have touched on the subject (given the core hero was repeatedly mentioned as "Optimus PRIME" not Primal)
I'm thinking either dead or off on another planet during the Beast Era. If he was on Cybertron, he would had been placed into stasis lock and had his spark removed. Hasbro blew a golden moment to pull off Vehicon Scourge. That would had a make a cool story line.
The Beast Wars writers suggested he had become a space explorer, yes. In the realm of published fiction, though, the 3H BotCon comics showed that he and many other Transformers of his era had left Cybertronian civilization behind and ascended to a kind of Transformer "Valhalla" called the J'nwan. The written-by-Simon-Furman-but-not-approved-by-Hasbro mini-comic "The Last Days of Optimus Prime" shows how this happened, and can be read here.
I prefer Optimus Prime and practically all from the Autobot/Decepticon war to be dead during the Beast era. It makes the universe seem older and richer if Cybertronian life continued after their death. It happened so long ago that this generation reveres him with an almost worship like view.
The thing that people (may) often forget, is that Beast Wars only took place 300 years after G1, which in itself, last for almost 9 million years IIRC. I know most Cybertronians were offline during Beast Machines, but it's not like Prime was a young 'bot who grew old by the time of the Beast era. A few more hundred years was nothing to these guys.
The assumption seems to be OpPrime either died or 'retired' between the G1 and BW eras. Myself, I like to believe that around the time Earth was declared off-limits by the Maximal Elders, Optimus Prime and a select group of Autobots (or Maximals, or Autobots-turned-Maximals) went to Earth to lay low and protect the planet from threats, having been declared dead/lost by the Elders as part of the cover-up.
Thank you for the comic read! Where can I get more of these type of comics that I can read on my computer. Transformer mythos is amazing. So vast! Its a treat when I can learn new mythos, it's just as exciting to me as getting a new figure. Sometimes I get new figures because of things I read. If there character and their story intrigue me i am going after that figure.
Hmm, that actually works into the spiritual aspect Beast Machines (and presumably Transtech, being done by the same guys), nifty!
I have to agree with a lot of you all, it was only 300 years in the future. He was probably out there doing something.
