Claw machine

A claw machine is a type of coin-operated arcade game consisting of an upright glass-walled cabinet housing a pile of prizes and a mechanical claw suspended from an overhead crane. A player uses a joystick to position the claw above the prize pile, then triggers it to lower, grip, and lift an item toward a chute where it can be collected if the grip holds. The design traces to construction equipment used in building the Panama Canal, and the first widely patented model, the Erie Digger, appeared in 1926, drawing its mechanism from Erie Canal excavation machinery. A later refinement, the Miami Digger of 1932, improved the claw's reliability. Decades later Japan's UFO Catcher line, introduced in 1985, became the most commercially successful version of the machine and popularized the arcade genre now often called clawcade. In some jurisdictions the machine's mix of skill and chance has drawn scrutiny as a form of gambling, though it is most commonly found in family arcades, shopping centers, and amusement venues where a single player competes against the mechanism itself rather than another person.