Candy crane, teddy picker, claw machine, whatever you call it, this arcade mainstay was robbing children of their golden tokens long before we slid into our first pair of Hammer pants, but despite the ...

The crane machine—also known as claw machines, crane games and, in Japan, as “UFO catchers” due to their proclivity for aerial abductions—first gripped the public imagination in the early 1900s. Even ...

As school and work wrap up, crowds fill Tokyo’s many bustling arcade halls — not to battle it out in fighting games, but to snag plush toys from claw machines. In one of these gaming meccas in the ...