The Claw
A carnival game's century-long climb to world domination.
Late in Toy Story’s plot, just when things are truly going off the rails, Sid brings Buzz and Woody to Pizza Planet. Disastrously separated in the restaurant’s overwhelming landscape, Buzz soon finds himself trapped in a pile of squeaky toy aliens.
He discovers that the aliens worship a strange god: a mechanical claw that descends from a great height, choosing members of the group as if they’re the elect. “The clawwww,” the aliens coo as it glides down.
Buried beneath the plot, Toy Story captured – and created – an important moment in claw games’ history. According to claw game-focused website Be the Claw, the 1980s saw claw games graduate from rudimentary horizontal cabinets to joystick-operated vertical games like the one that appears in Toy Story.
But even as it accurately reflected coin game history, Toy Story inadvertently shifted the games’ future trajectory. Since its release in 1995, the movie has kicked off a series of consequences still shaping the world today. Claw games are more popular than ever.
If you trace claw games’ history back far enough, you won’t be able to avoid learning about diggers. In digger games, players operated a miniature steam shovel. A finicky dial controlled the steam shovel’s jaws, which players would swing into piles of coins, candy or other prizes.
Diggers became as common as phone booths. In 1932, a model called the Miami Digger upgraded the game by adding an electric motor and valuable prizes, like watches. A man named William Bartlett owned the patent, and he made a fortune. Individual operators also struck gold, with some earning up to $35,000 in a single year – an extraordinary sum, considering it only cost a nickel or a dime to play.
As the game’s popularity grew, it also attracted scrutiny. In 1951, the Johnson Act (aka the Transportation of Gambling Devices Act) allowed the FBI to crack down on gambling, and the law didn’t distinguish diggers from slot machines. Though the Feds left stationary diggers at stores and restaurants alone, carnival operators who crossed state lines were no longer allowed to travel with the games. Coin games went on hiatus until 1973, when the FBI more or less abandoned the Johnson Act.
During the Johnson Act years, coin game enthusiasts quietly drove new developments in coin game technology. By the 1980s, diggers yielded to a new coin game: claw machines. Toy Story’s squeaky aliens were a spin on the most common claw reward – inexpensive and easily-grabbed stuffed animals. Within a year of Toy Story’s release, claw games were fully back in vogue. American Coin Merchandising loaded Walmarts across the country up with as many as a dozen claw games each, in lobbies or dedicated game rooms.
Players began developing and sharing their techniques, often using online forums (and later, YouTube) to reveal the precise rhythms of different claws. Lucky Crane claw games from the 1970s behave differently than today’s two-pronged Japanese claw games, which are challenging yet reliable, and colorfully named “Sega UFO Catchers.”
The strategy is necessary because the odds are never in the player’s favor; claw machines are programmed to tighten and weaken the claw’s grip at random intervals, causing prizes to drop. Some computerized algorithms even limit the number of wins within a certain period of time to protect profit margins.
Photo by Kat Lin
Today, claw game fever reaches far beyond a few collectors and enthusiasts with YouTube channels. In fact, Taiwan appears to be in the grip of it. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Finance, the claw game business is booming, with the number of operators tripling in a two-year period. Currently, claw games serve as the government’s largest source of entertainment tax income, thanks to the more than 100,000 operators who rent space in more than 10,000 claw arcades. (The entire article, written and photographed by Kat Lin, is fascinating and worth reading in full.)
Curiously, Taiwanese claw games offer seemingly mundane prizes like hair dryers or toilet paper. “[I]t’s often much cheaper to win them than buy them in the stores, even after several tries,” Lin notes. They’re also fun and addictive, offering a cheap dopamine hit that’s barely different from opening social media – except that you can actually walk away with a prize.
Toy Story 4 came out about a week ago, and I’ve heard that a sentient spork plays a major role in it. Who knows what effect that might have; maybe in a few years, we’ll look back and realize Toy Story’s power yet again.
Something else
For the second year in a row, my wonderful friend Catherine Jessee has curated a playlist of songs her friends can’t stop listening to. The songs are all over the map, jumping from the Grateful Dead to Lizzo.
I chose two songs: “Birdies” by Strange Ranger (who absolutely killed it last Friday in Baltimore) and “Quiet Light,” my favorite track on the new National record (I also saw them last week, lol).
Listen to the full playlist here!
One more thing
Catherine is a good friend to Scavenger, too. She recently submitted a plug for this little newsletter to an extremely cool zine called The Smudge.
Here we are in print!
If you’re interested in buying a copy, you can scoop one up online or check out the list of stockists to see if it’s available in your city. The Smudge is sold all over the world, from Brighton to Nashville to Tokyo! This is by far one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me, I can’t even believe it.
Thank you, Catherine! And to anyone who found us through The Smudge: Welcome!