Claw machine
It and its successor, the Miami Digger, were popular throughout the United States during the 1930s, specifically during the Great Depression, as carnival attractions and as furniture in public places.
[2] During the Great Depression, designing intricate, Art Deco claw machines for hotels and stores became a lucrative endeavor.
[13] By 1994, its claw could be changed to fit the sizes and shapes of different prizes, and it had become a craze across Japan: arcades started dedicating entire floors to UFO Catcher cabinets—of which Sega had sold over 40,000, making it Sega's best-selling game at the time—and the term "UFO catcher" became synonymous with crane games in Japan.
[18][19] In 2021, claw machines accounted for more than half of the revenue at Japanese arcades, according to the Japan Amusement Industry Association.
[32] There were many instances of children getting stuck inside of claw machines in the United States throughout the 2010s, including in Tennessee, New York, Kentucky, Nebraska, Pennsylvania,[32] North Carolina,[33] and Texas.
[43] In the 1995 film Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody climb into a claw vending machine filled with claw-worshipping aliens.
[44] In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Skill Crane" from its fourth season, Squidward becomes addicted to trying to win a prize from a claw machine.
[46][47][48] The passing of the Johnson Act by Congress in 1951, which prohibited the transfer of electronic gambling devices across state lines, led to Miami Diggers at carnivals being destroyed by operators or seized by government officials.
Because of this, a compromise was soon reached that allowed carnival owners to keep the diggers but required them to be manually operated with no coin slot and prizes that were not money and worth one dollar or less, while the government would tax each machine US$10.
In 2016, New Jersey Senator Nicholas Scutari proposed legislation that would add specifications to prevent claw machines from being unwinnable.
[50] In other jurisdictions, such as Alberta, Canada, skill cranes are illegal unless the player is allowed to make repeated attempts (on a single credit) until he or she wins a prize.
[28] In 2020, the Ministry of Interior in Thailand ordered a nationwide ban on claw machines after activists protested against their widespread availability.
An investigation by South Korea's Game Rating and Administration Committee in 2017 found that the majority of claw machines they randomly inspected broke Korean law.
[3] Settings like claw strength—which is controlled by the amount of voltage sent to a claw—and "dropping skill"—the ability of a claw to drop a prize back into the machine after picking it up—are frequently modified by arcade owners to control the odds of a player winning and are often based on how much money the machine has earned.
[30][3][24][57] On social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, videos of people using claw machines and offering modifications for how to get prizes from them were popular in the 2010s and 2020s.
[59] A 2016 report by Jeff Rossen for the American TV program Today showing the same thing prompted the American Amusement Machine Association, which represents arcade game manufacturers across the United States, to make their members sign a "Fair Play Pledge" in 2017 that required their machines to be winnable through skill alone.
