As if hanging out with Cher and throwing shade at hapless jailbird Jon Schaffer wasn't enough to earn our enduring love, Cannibal Corpse frontman and death metal GOAT George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher has proved himself a hero once again by sharing his tips for winning stuffed toys on claw machines.
Corpsegrinder addresses his obsession with claw machines and their cuddly contents in an epic new interview with Metal Hammer. Turns out this death metal icon spends much of his downtime in arcades perfecting the art of the claw, and we have photos of his stuffed animal collection to prove it.
“I love claw machines. It could be anything in there - it could be a cartoon character that I don't like — and I’ll get ’em anyway,” he tells s.
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We had to ask him what his secret was. This is what he said…
“I play the claw. I'm like a kid at Disney; I'm looking what's in there, and then I'm looking at how it's sitting inside of there. Is there something on top of it? Do I have to move that?
“As soon as I see how the claw reacts, I'll know if I'm gonna win. If the actual hands of the claw are set really loose, or maybe the machine has been used a lot, then sometimes stuff will just slip out.
“If there's a humanoid figure or a creature with arms or legs, I will try to get the claw in between the legs and the shoulder. If I can't do that because it’s laying at an angle, then I’ll try to move it to a spot where it will be in the right space. But if I pick up something up and you are around watching me, you are not allowed to say anything. When it drops in the hole and it’s down in the bottom where I grab it, then you can say, ‘You got it!’ But if you say anything while it’s in the claw… that’s when you see me mad.”
It turns out he’s very serious about the “no speaking while the claw is action” rule, as one young bystander found out.
“I swear to you, I yelled at a kid once. We were in Texas at a claw machine. I picked up this car, it was a Dale Earnhardt Sr, No.3 car. My mother watched Nascar forever, and that was her car. I wanted it for her.
“Anyway, this kid is watching me. I’d told everybody that they couldn’t say anything until it was in that hole. So I get it in the claw, and the machine is picking it up, and he goes, ‘You got it!’ And sure e-fucking-nough, that thing drops.
I turned to the kid, and said, [malevolent stare] ‘Go away right now.’ He was, like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ I said, ‘I fucking told you, why would you do that?’ [Grits teeth] I’m getting mad again just thinking about it.”
The other key rule he abides by is: no gaming the machines.
“I saw this YouTube video of a guy who got kicked out of some arcade, and he had a system that to win - somebody had told him where to touch the sides of the claw machine, or a certain area on it, and you will always win,” he says. “Like the sensors treat it as a test run or something. That‘s like stacking the deck of cards or cheating at Monopoly. You didn’t really win. I know I have legitimately won every damn thing I’ve got out of a claw machine honestly.”
And what does Corpsegrinder do with the prizes he wins? It turns out he gives a load of them to charity.
I just like to play the claw machines. I save up quarters, and when I win we gonna donate them for kids for Christmastime or whatever. We played somewhere in Michigan once, and the club we were playing had a sign saying, ‘“On such and such a date, we're doing a toy drive.’
“So I found out who was in charge of the club and said, ‘So you're in charge of this toy drive? I got a whole bunch of stuffed animals I won on this tour, I'll give ’em to you.’ And they’re, like, ‘Don't you want to give them to your kids?’ If there’s any they might want, I put them in a separate bag, but they have enough stuffed animals anyway.”
Go read the full interview, then check out Cannibal Corpse’s killer new album Violence Unimagined.
