I was recently able to make the long overdue trip to Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, and it didn't disappoint. The location is split between offering a video/redemption arcade, but its real attraction is its offerings of electromechanical machines and other curiosities common to the "penny arcade" era of machines.

I've been familiar with some of these attractions and some of the early pinball tables, but what this trip allowed me to discover was the "dare" style of machines - you stick your hand into the machine and it does a variety of things to try to scare you into moving your hand. This varied between machines from being lightly jabbed by plastic "torture devices" to dropping toy spiders near your hand to having a fake snake strike toward your hand.

I'll obviously have more to say on this location soon, but I felt I finally needed to get out this way as it is one of the staple arcade locations in Michigan - along with Pinball Pete's - being threatened because the property owners want to tear the existing buildings down for other developments. In the case of Marvin's, this veritable museum of mechanical devices is threatened in order to clear way for ... another Meijer department store location.

At the least, the owner has assured people the location will remain through this year, and there is a full intention of relocating instead of completely calling it quits. It's been said the real challenge in pinpointing a new location is ceiling height - and I can see why this would be the case after visiting. There is all manner of historical decorations covering the walls, and some of the smaller machines that likely don't work anymore are hoisted up for display so people can still take them in visually.

I absolutely recommend stopping by this location if you are able, but you can take in a few samples of what is on offer in my quick video:

I just learned that the electromechanical version of the Joker Poker pinball table (Gottlieb, 1978) has different rules than the solid state version (which came out soon after), and that the rules that make the gameplay interesting and varied are only in the solid state version.

(I learned this from https://twitch.tv/BorgDog, who preserves real pinball tables and also makes virtual versions of them in VPX.)

This makes sense I guess: EM pinball was a dying technology, and there wouldn't be much motivation to add expensive scoring mechs to it while they were also programming a circuit board that could just multiply things. But I would have previously called Joker Poker "one of the best EMs", and that's wrong, because the EM version is so inferior.