Novelty Automation
I spent this weekend past in London with Caoimhe³ and other than seeing Hadestown and bankrupting ourselves eating out1 one of the things I was looking forward to was bringing Caoimhe to Novelty Automation, which I had been to once before.
Novelty Automation is one of the most British things I have ever experienced and somehow I mean that as a compliment. It’s a small shop with a collection of homemade, satirical, mechanical arcade machines made mostly by Tim Hunkin. Hunkin has been making these since the ’80s but is still at it, parodying Airbnb and Amazon warehouse conditions. Each machine is coin-operated and vary from the mostly scripted, like the Autofrisk machine, to the more game-like The Small Hadron Collider, a converted pachinko machine, and The Expressive Photobooth makes for a good souvenir.
One of the reasons I wanted to drag Caoimhe out to it, other than just to show it to her, is because I wanted to have another go at My Nuke a machine where one loads fuel rods into a nuclear reactor with a mechanical arm that feels like something out of The Crystal Maze. I have said before that I love a game that feels like operating heavy machinery and this is one that is much more literal example. Sadly I did not prevent a meltdown on my second go at it, but maybe on a future trip my third time will be lucky.
