In a Petah Tikva warehouse, 230 claw crane arcade machines are hard at work clutching soft toys, colorful boxes and hitting specific targets.
The players can be anywhere on Earth and, for the cost of roughly one or two bucks, can access the experience using their mobile phones, through which they can see the machine and use control buttons to direct the claw.
Prizes won through the machines are shipped to their doorsteps from logistic centers in the US and China.
Skilled players collect hundreds of such soft toys, and their smiling faces next to their impressive collections are posted on Clawee’s social media presence.
“Clawee is celebrating its third birthday this year,” Ron Brightman – the character’s creator and Clawee co-founder, 47 – told me.
“When we thought of it we imagined it as a female, but we discovered most users think of her as a male so we keep it vague.”
The fuzzy light-blue character appears on the painted inside of each arcade game along with the company logo.
“This machine is so difficult we were unable to win [on] it; we brought out all our team members and we all took turns and nobody could win a prize so we never used it. If a machine is too hard to beat it is not a sport anymore.”
The workshop is where the games are actually made. Due to the fact they are meant to be played online, the games only need to be big enough for the camera lens to offer the player a good depth experience. There is no need to build an entire machine body as the game is not meant to stand at shopping malls or pizza parlors and serve people who are standing up.
This means the games can be mounted on top of each other, allowing Brightman and Frommer to invent and offer more games for their clients.
“We are maybe the only place in the Western world that still manufactures its own games,” he said.
Brightman insists that his games are fair and players can improve their skills and up their chances of winning them, an important distinguishing factor between gaming and gambling.
Pirate slot machines, for example, do not offer players a path to improve. Each pull is meant to be a fair wager. In contrast, Clawee claims to offer arcade machines that are, in principle, beatable.
The range is impressive, from claw cranes that strive to pick up a soft toy from the Nintendo Mario Brothers franchise to complex games like “The Safe.” There, a gamer is meant to drop the claw to hit a number sequence that opens a virtual safe. “Torpedo” is a game where dropping the claw is done in relation to a simple video game in which one can sink a submarine if the drop triggers a missile in the right moment. The warehouse features includes shooting games and even mining games.
Heavy construction is actually the cultural origin of claw games. The 1934 Panama Digger, made by Scientific Machine Corp, was inspired by the 1914 completion of the Panama Canal, and was soon followed by the 1939 Miami Digger made by W. D. Bartlett.
Today, the most popular such game in the world is Toy Soldier which is made by Coastal Amusements Inc.
“This was our first machine,” Brightman says as he shows it to me, “we got this from a convenience store to even see if we could offer such a service. A live feed with the means to control the machine remotely. Today we have a back-up generator and a private, and secure, web connection to ensure our players could enjoy their experience no matter what.”
Most players (70%) are women, and at any given moment there are roughly 200,000 gamers on the site and twice that number watching them. Some are planning their own moves to beat a complex machine like “The Safe,” while others just enjoy watching skilled players.
Brightman hopes to set up a league and hold digital competitions as well as expand the range of games currently on offer to include bowling.
While a smiling worker re-sets the prizes in order after a game on one machine, I notice that the prizes are, in fact, small painted boxes.
“This is our way to offer different things,” Brightman explains. “If you pick up a soft toy, great, you get a soft toy shipped to your home. If you pick up a box we can offer you anything, earrings, an inflatable swimming pool; all these things can be said to virtually “be” inside the box.”
The romantic glow around arcade games stems from the human desire to beat the machine. A wish centuries old seen by the 1770-made “The Turk,” an automated chess playing robot that “won” most games until it was discovered a living chess-master was inside of it. However, Brightman and Frommer were not motivated by that.
“We’re both very competitive,” Frommer explained, “he’s into swimming, I’m into other sports, he’s married to my wife’s sister so that’s how we knew each other.”
“We came to gaming from digital marketing,” Brightman said, “and what I like about that field is that it is easy to measure successes. We knew that the world of gaming apps is very hard to get into and realized that arcade games are something everybody on earth knows and played at some point.”
“We offer a live, non-virtual gaming experience,” Brightman concluded, “and now during COVID-19 the interest is expanding beyond our wildest hopes.”