Quintessons

"[We] are Quintessons! Arrogance is our life’s blood, ambition is our food and drink, but most of all, hubris is the air we breathe!"

- Al-Badur about his own race known as the Quintessons.

The Quintessons, also known under the racial slur '"Squids'", are an ancient race of naturally sadistic mechanoids and a species from the Transformers franchise. Being the creators of the Decepticons and Autobots, the Quintessons acts as one of the major antagonists in the Generation One's 3rd season as well as tertiary antagonists of the G1 movie.

Masters of the Transformer race and fall
Being one of the oldest and most manipulative races in existence, the Quintessons created a long line of non-sentient robots called the Transformers in a planet-sized "factory" known as Cybertron. Each Transformer was placed in one of two castes; Autobot (a factory worker) or Decepticon (a gladiatorial soldier). The Quintessons were incredibly cruel to their creations, forcing them to kill each other for their own amusement, leading to the Transformers gaining sentience and rebelling against their creators. These Transformers are led A3, who later became known as Alpha Trion.

Due to the fact Quintessons were completely defenseless against anything hostile towards them, they were defeated easily and the Transformers formed a utopia on Cybertron as the dominant race. However a civil war broke out between them due to the Decepticons' arrogance, supremacy, and under the leadership of the evil Megatron. Their war lead to Earth where the heroic Autobots were assisted by the humans in their conflict.

The Transformers: The Movie
On the year 2005, the Quintessons are seen capturing various robotic lifeforms & creating mock trials for them to be fed to the Sharkticons. Their mock trials appear to have no purpose at all rather than their own pleasure. One of the Quintessons' minions have manages to catch Autobots Hod Rod & Kup after they crashed on the planet Quintessa. He then tries to place them under trial by declaring them "innocent" by feeding them to the Sharkticons, only to be interrupted by the Dinobots & a young Transformer kid named Wheelie. Grimlock then urges the Sharkticons to rebel against the Quintesson judge, forcing them to retreat.

Trivia

 * The Quintessons appear in almost every media of the Transformers universe as the creators of the Transformer race with the exception of the Aligned continuity wherein Primus created the Transformers and a Prime named Quintus Prime created them instead. The Quintessons always appeared as one of the Autobot's enemies aside from the Decepticons, whom they formed an alliance oftentimes.
 * Despite they aren't fully allied with the Decepticons, the Quintessons are labeled as Decepticons in the original timestream, due to their oftentimes allegiance with them. Also, they use to own the Decepticon combiner group Predacons & once controlled the combiner group Terrorcons.
 * It was rumored that had Transformers Generation 1 TV series had a full forth season, they would have allied themselves with the devourer of worlds, Unicron.
 * In the Marvel comics however, they are depicted as Unicron's enforcers.
 * The Quintessons are currently rumored by fans and viewers as the unseen "creators" in Transformers: Age of Extinction and they are currently believed to appear as the main antagonists of Transformers 5.