A theoretician-in-training prior to the war, Sideswitch earned the full version of his title shortly before the fall of the Senate and the Decepticon uprising, and aligned himself with the Autobots within the first few years. He operated as a frontliner for a short period before higher ranking mecha found his education and abilities to be of better use elsewhere, and he worked his way into the special ops numbers from there.

Sideswitch spent a period of the war documenting reconnaissance data on various topics, and fed what little he could discern back to Autobot signals he was able to retrieve in short frequencies. When he wasn't collecting reconnaissance data, Sideswitch functioned as a deployable special ops agent for the Autobot cause.