casual audiences. Two players could also operate cranes simultaneously, intended to encourage more social interaction, such as between couples. Sega's UFO Catcher series led to claw cranes becoming increasingly popular in Japan during the 1980s to 1990s. By 1994, Sega had sold over 40,000 UFO Catcher cabinets, with the term UFO Catcher itself becoming synonymous with crane games in Japan. Claw cranes gradually became popular across other parts of Asia as well, such as South Korea and China, during the 1990s to 2000s. United States In the early 20th century, popular photographs of the excavation of the Panama Canal made the steam shovel into an object of popular fascination. This trend inspired novelty candy dispensers made to look like steam shovels. Players would put a nickel into the slot of a glass-fronted cabinet and crank a wheel to engage a series of internal gears. The tiny bucket-jaws swung down, closed over a piece of candy, rose, and dropped the sweet into a chute where it could be retrieved. Early versions of these games include the Panama Digger, Erie Digger, and Iron Claw. The most successful model was the Miami Digger patented by carnival operator William Bartlett in 1932. The prizes were silver dollars or rolls of coins, and Bartlett operated the machines himself rather than selling them. Over the decades, the mechanics and aesthetics of these candy dispensers evolved into the modern claw games of today. A claw machine labeled "Toy Steam Shovel" appears in a drugstore in the cartoon Naughty but Mice (1939) featuring Sniffles the Mouse. In Davis Grubb's 1971 novel, The Barefoot Man, set in 1930 in West Virginia, Jack Farjeon wants to get a gun in secret and is challenged to retrieve one from a crane game, at a price of $10 a play, with the first play free. He gets the gun after seven tries. Following the arrival of Japanese and European claw machines in the late 1970s, these machines became popular in the United States in the late 1980s, with a significant presence at Pizza Hut restaurants, although they were to be found much earlier. Later on, the machines spread to other venues, and by the early 1990s, the NFL began to advertise their teams with stuffed footballs of each team placed in some of the machines. Soon after, the MLB, NBA, and NHL also started doing this, although the NBA no longer uses