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 ...