If William Gibson and Bruce Sterling had written an arcade scene into “The Difference Engine”, it probably would have looked a lot like [Pete Wood]’s Meccano Martian Mission, as illustrated in the video below by the [London Meccano Club]. Meccano Martian Mission is an homage to Atari’s 1978 Lunar Lander video game, but entirely electromechanical and made of– you guessed it– Meccano.
You might think Meccano is “too modern” to count as steampunk, but it squeaks just into the Victorian era. The first sets hit stores in 1901, the last year of Queen Victoria’s long reign. Since then, Meccano has developed a large following that has produced some truly impressive constructions, and this arcade game can stand amongst the best of them.
The game has all the features of the original: a swiveling spaceship, two-axis speed control, and even a little yellow flame that pops out when you are applying thrust. There’s a timer and a fuel gauge, and just like the original, there are easier and harder landing pads that offer score multipliers. While the score must be totted up manually, the game will detect a crash and flag it with a pop-down banner. It really has to be seen to be believed. It’s all done with cams and differentials hitting potentiometers and microswitches — not an Arduino in sight; [Pete] does a good job explaining it in the second half of the embedded video, starting about 10 minutes in.
Sure, might not be new or groundbreaking — these are old, old techniques — but not many people know them well enough to use them anymore, especially not with this degree of sophistication. To see these electromechanical techniques applied anachronistically to replicate one of the great pioneers of the arcade world tickles our fancy. It’s no wonder that perfecting this mechanical marvel has taken [Pete Wood] a decade.
The project reminds us of the Meccano Pinball Machine featured here years ago, but that somehow felt like a more natural fit for the apparently undead building kits. We lamented Meccano’s demise in 2023,but the brand is apparently being revived this year. Hopefully, that means there can be more young members for the [London Meccano Club] and groups like them, to keep the perforated-steel flame alive through another six reigns.
This hack is the bee’s knees, and we’re very thankful to [Tim Surtell] for the tip. Remember, the tip line is always open!.
Cool, really really cool!
And beautiful!
Ancient Meccano fan here. I used it to make the first ever RepRap prototype. Things went full circle and I’ve made a printable Open Source metric Meccano-like library https://www.printables.com/model/1177182 which can be incorporated into CAD models to make them modular. Additions welcome.
Whoa, excellent post, TY!
Honestly I didn’t believe there was any activity at RepRep anymore. I just remembered there was a person who was the face of the org, and he left for a commercial venture, and there didn’t seem to be any announced handoff or transition.
Today if you go to reprap.org homepage, you get: “Bad gateway Error code 502” from CloudFlare.
Yep, still going. Working on micron-scale fabrication – covered by Hackaday! https://hackaday.com/2025/04/21/jolly-wrencher-down-to-the-micron/ (now at 3 layers but still tinkering).
Dr Bowyer basically retired, but still advises behind the scenes. Mostly the 3D printer revolution revolves on, and the groundwork had all been done, so people went quiet. As there haven’t been any major shifts in hobbyist printers for some time, some of the old disruptive ideas got revived again :)
The Bad Gateway doesn’t happen at this end, even with HTTP/HTTPS redirections (unlike http://blog.reprap.org which stubbornly refuses to go HTTPS for hysterical^Whistorical reasons and confuses the heck out of everyone). CloudFlare is like that some days.
An electromechanical imitation of an Atari video game? Reminds me of this,
https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/but-mom-i-wanted-pong/
What an incredible waste of time to make a contraption like this.
And still… I like it.
At some point in the future, I hope to have time to waste on such contraptions.
I know you’re joking but…Think about how many children would be inspired by this, wether into programming or mechanical engineering for example, even one child finding their future what ever it is, makes this entire endeavour worth it.
This is awesome! I want flaming LED’s on the ship’s rockets and a bit of a roar sound. Maybe some smoke too lol.
Reminds me of the old… Jaycopter. There are also Midway Whirly Bird or Sega helicopter coin-ops.
Needs one of those oil-burning smoke generators you would find in the old train sets.
That’s bloody marvelous!
Where can one (USA) purchase non-kit Mecanno parts, either branded or clone?
I find lots of “kits” on Amazon, but I don’t want a car or a robot kit. I just want to be able to order the structural parts that could be found in a kit.
and lo the plastic industry looked upon meccano and said
“nay,’tis not plastic they shall have none of it”
instead of one kit of parts that built 250 separate projects with scope for imagination and joy, the evil ones said
“they shall one plastic toy per kit and no more, fi to their imagination”
and it came to pass that meccano, the breeding ground of engineers and hackers died, to be replaced with the abomination that is lego
hey now, when I was a wee bairn LEGO wasn’t sold with kits. I got a bucket, and I built stuff. Robots mostly.
Then I got erector sets (US Meccano variant). Followed by a Girder and Panel kit.
I actually built a working film projector with my erector set, took quite some time to get the gate to work, but I finally did. Wish I had kept that.
Uh, if someone gets a Lego set and can only build the picture on the box, I don’t think the problem is with the toy.
The dumbest of the dumb build the kit and leave it on the shelf, assembled.
Next to the plastic dolls from same franchise.
I’ve heard that some even glue the kits together, never observed that first hand.
I’d think the glue would ‘ruin the collectability’.
Truism: ‘Anything made to be collectable, will never be collectable.’
Remember the ‘Upper Deck’ full sheet of super rare/valuable rookie cards fiasco.
Sports card bubble popping was brutal, almost as bad as comic books, those stupid ceramic figures and Beenie babies.
Still better than Franklin Mint or Timeshares, that crap is never worth anything.
You can get used, steam cleaned, mixed LEGO by the bucket on Amazon for a decent price, roughly the same as new crappy clone bricks. I found an average 1 non-lego brick/10 lb bucket, which is f’n amazing.
Thrift stores get many incomplete kits, they end up there.
Have you looked at a Lego set from the last decade or two?
Great build ! A live action version of a video game is really a good flip of the script. There have been many mechanical arcade games from the 30s to the 70s by names like Seeburg (jukeboxes) and Sega. I saw one on display in a vintage arcade (funny to say that about video arcade games) that was a mechanical shooting game…Shoot The Mother-in-law. It was on display only and looked worn out.
With another 10 years he should be able to fit his game in a cabinet.