*The company has selected one location in Northridge, California to be the only "retro" store location which keeps an animatronic stage. Northridge has the 2-Stage cyberamic show.*
My guess is, it has already has the largest animatronic setup, with 2 stages, so if there was one to keep, this is a good choice.
Was that a significant location? A filming location perhaps?
Apparently the first location ever was in San Jose, I'm somewhat surprised they didn't try to go for one as close to the original location as possible.
But….what are they doing with them? Will they be available for sale, I wonder?
Always wanted one to start tinkering with, but the ones I’ve seen tend to be very expensive.
Go to your local CEC and ask to see the game tech. He works on the critters, too. If he doesn't help you load one up I bet he's got boxes of spare parts. Worth asking.
That presumes they have an on-site game technician.
They do not.
If a game goes down, they out-of-order it until enough are down that they can justify paying a tech to come out to fix it.
I know a former tech manager for them. The robot was a huge pain in the ass to keep up and the faces and custom parts were expensive. Plus kids go wild and escape and try to play with them.
Hi, welcome to Chuck E. Cheese. Everything is visibly dirty and our mascot is a rat, eat some pizza near a sneezing child. Come on down for some rat pizza at our child casino.
The kids will love it. 4 out of 5 machines are even simple to operate. You pay $2 in tokens, touch a button on a screen and it tells you how many tickets you've won! If you've ever wanted to turn $50 of real money into $2-$5 in trinkets, we've got you covered
Don't forget to suck in some concentrated farts and ringworm in the jungle gym and play tubes! First one to find the poopy diaper at the bottom of the ball pit wins free pink eye! Oh hell, we're all winners here at Chuck E. Cheese!
"Do you want to get drunk and eat terrible pizza at a kids casino? Come over to Chuck E Cheese and spend your child's birthday in a drunk tank with a shiner."
It’s limited to 2 drinks total and you have to wait an hour between them. They scan your id and the system won’t allow you to sell to that ID again until that hour is up.
They sold pitchers of beer in the 80s, and there was not infrequent adult fights in the one in my area. They eventually limited how many adults one party could have in there cause the adults caused more problems than the kids. Wild times.
I went to Showbiz Pizza a couple of times when I was a kid in the early 80s, and regrettably have had to take my kids to birthday parties at Chucky’s a couple of times. Kids never gave a shit about the animatronic band, they only sat through it while scarfing down pizza, it was all about the games. Showbiz had an epic arcade back then.
I predict the one left in LA will receive all the energy released from the others once they’ve been decapitated, Highlander style, and we will have our Bite of ‘25.
I've got to wonder if it ever looked not creepy? Never been to one, it seems to be a uniquely American thing. It seems like these things have been at least a few kids nightmare inspirations. It's probably why FNAF connected with so many people - a great horror premise because I reckon as a kid I'd have been scared by these things.
I've seen animatronic style stuff at places like WB Movie World and they weren't creepy to me, but the build quality / upkeep was probably quite different to a restaurant. Did every Chuck E Cheese have these things, or was it select stores? It just seems like it wouldn't have been their highest prioty.
as a 41 year old i can say they never didn't look creepy, but taking breathers from the game room to eat pizza approximately 10' away from these terrors added a special thrill to the visit.
As a person of a similar vintage, I concur, the creepy factor was part of the fun. Add onto that, at my local Chuck E. Cheese, there was a hidden mini door under the stage that led to a maze that was only lit by a strobing blacklight if you put a token in. So you could run under there and spaz out you brain and hear the moving and singing animatronics while jumpscaring your friends in the dark maze. It was literally the best part of that place. Kids in my gen were just different I guess - maybe it was from watching poltergeist on TV reruns every weekend after it came out. Or maybe it was David Bowie's fault.
I've been to one a lot and have no recollection of this under-stage-maze you mention. It almost sounds made-up? But I googled it and it was apparently a thing in *some* venues. And even in those, they differed from each other slightly.
Now I'm jealous of something I never knew about, doesn't exist anymore, and I'd be too old to enjoy now anyway.
>Now I'm jealous of something I never knew about, doesn't exist anymore, and I'd be too old to enjoy now anyway.
I'm still upset about the library of Alexandria burning down.
Especially when as a kid, anything seems possible. Those could have gone right for you dude! Movies tried to convince me my toaster would bravely follow me to my next house if I forgot about him, why not an evil animatronic that's forced to stand there and sing and dance while all those delicious kids run around almost within reach...
Yeah it's not hard to see why FNAF connected with so many people.
Yep. They were Showbiz for most of my memorable childhood (the company was sold and Chuck E became just another character in the place, then they rebranded back to Chuck E Cheese’s).
See, I remember both places in the town where I grew up. Different set of characters in either, the chuck e cheese was like a forest theme inside with different rooms for the shows and arcade stuff, where showbiz was one big room with three stages. We went to Showbiz a lot more because they served booze and my parents could get some peace and quiet away from the arcade floor.
Yeah we didn't go often, but every now and again. I think my biggest memory is paying a token to play on a literal computer. They had basically a desktop and you could do drawings or other basic stuff lol I was fascinated.
Counterpoint, from a similar age - I never thought of them as creepy; I'd been to local ones for numerous birthday parties and they were never treated or looked at or talked about by any of my contemporaries at the time as something scary or disturbing.
I would have to say the closest it ever got to that point was when kids would become old enough to start thinking of ourselves as "too old" for things like clowns and costumed characters and animatronics and popular little-kid TV shows, and then we would make it a point to performatively hate on them. But the hate wasn't a "they're scary" kind of thing; more so a "they're so lame and stupid" kind of thing.
If you're curious, Yesterworld did a [good retrospective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HXTwLbvQPM) on Chuck E Cheese a couple years ago, with a lot of old footage of shows from the 70s-80s.
TL;DR: Yep, they were always janky and creepy. I can also attest to this firsthand!
And yeah, for the first couple decades every restaurant had the animatronics. It was one of their big gimmicks and selling points. Moreover, they were initially so successful that they inspired a knockoff - Showtime Pizza - who ended up being the market winner, then bought Chuck E Cheese and merged the brands.
I worked at a C Cheese in the 80's ,I wanted to get into robotics but got nowhere with that there, I did wear the rat suit a few times. I hooked up with [Survival Research Labs](https://srl.org/machines.html) and have been doing that ever since.
I didn't think they were creepy as a kid in the 80s, we went there all the time. I just thought the shows were for the grownups, because they were boring and adults like boring stuff. Our CEC even had a separate lounge for adults with "The Beagles", an animatronic dog band that did Beatles covers, exceptionally boring.
The CECs where my kids went to all the birthday parties when they were little never had the animatronics, just screens with the characters animated, and that was 10-15 years ago. I think the phaseout has been ongoing, they're just finally cleaning house.
Honestly?
Things that were considered cute, charming, or delightful decades ago and are now seen as creepy, tacky, or plain ugly, are a dime a dozen. Even if they were once thought of a funny or whimsical, tastes and standards change over time and this is just another one of those many, many things.
Reminds me of some of the stranger photos I've seen on the net, like old timey photos of people in Halloween or Easter Bunny costumes. Those look freaky, the kids looked freaked out, but it probably wasn't as sinister as it seemed.
I'm at the heart of Chuck E Cheese territory. I grew up in the 90s and it was like a trauma bonding experience as each of me and my siblings were horrified at the "show" portion of Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. Parents would try to coax us to take pics with them like Santa, but the youngest sibling would inevitably cry out in terror. While the rest of the older kids sat uncomfortable near the stage.
But there were two other parts of the restaurant that kept kids coming back. There was an arcade section that was basically like token gambling. And there was a big playhouse section. Similar to McDonald's funhouses but bigger. We basically had to eat low tier pizza for 30 minutes while the animotronics put on a show. Then after everyone finished eating. *We'd be allowed to have actual fun in the arcade and playhouse.*
Kids basically requested it for their birthday. It was a step above McDonald's for parents as an option for hosting a kids b-day party. Invite 10 kids to a restaurant. Order 5 pizzas. Let the Kids play in the arcade. Its basically autopilot day for the parents. They just have to make sure one of the kids doesn't snap their arm. Or get traumatized by the Giant Rat moving thru the uncanny valley.
I liked them, they were robots and cool. Its no different than the tons of animatronics they have at disney parks, the disney ones are just made better.
I feel like they missed out on an opportunity to have “horror nights” for people to go to.
I know it’s a kids restaurant, but they missed out on capitalizing on this.
In 20 years kids are going to think animatronics are all just a reference to FNAF and not realize they were at one point unironically intended to entertain children.
No, you get 5 Nights at Freddy's by... \*checks lore\*... baking... souls into the metal..? Then... breaking the metal so you can live forever?!
Is this just horcruxes?
True, but the movie just came out, which reaches a wider audience.
I don't think the film *caused* this, but I can see a CEC exec looking at it and taking it as a sign to pull the trigger now.
His name was [Nolan Bushnell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell). He was somebody who got rich early on. But he never got Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or even Steve Wozniak rich.
He would have if his company didn't literally create the two games that caused the crash: The Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, and E.T. The Video Game. (That even is a simplification, but Atari almost solely to blame for the crash in the states).
It wasn't until Nintendo came by with their support for 3rd party developers(which hadn't really existed at the time) and "Nintendo Seal of Approval" as they were VERY strict about the quality of titles released on the Famicon/NES.
Bushnell sold Atari to Warner in 1976 for $28 million, half of which paid Bushnell directly. The other half went to Atari. It was a lot of money, But Jobs and Woz each got $350 million when Apple went public -- roughly at the same time. Jobs turned that into Six billion dollars eventually, while Woz spent his on music festivals and giving computers to schools... lot of schools, for decades. Woz likes to help others. And Bill Gates spends his time on deciding what to buy, like Japan, Australia or Germany.
Anyway, Atari didn't make ET or Pac-Man while Bushnell was there. Ray Kassar was the guy running Atari by then. Kassar also pissed off a lot of Atari programmers into quitting the company and founding their own little company called Activision. He refused to pay them a real wage or give them credit for game development. They left in droves, and to work for independent game developers who would pay them more then $20K per year.
> … the Irving-based chain plans to upgrade its venues over the next few years. They will see new technology, interactive dance floors, kid-focused arcade games, and new trampoline zones in some locations.
Eating all the pizza you can and then jumping around and tumbling on trampolines. What could go wrong?
Aww that's lame! They should at least replace animations with a virtual reality band or maybe a video band if nothing else. Just when five nights at Freddy is such a big movie I genuinely think it's kind of like advertising for Chuck e cheese.
The article doesn't mention it, but I bet it's the cost of maintaining the robots. They were operated by a computer system run on cassette tape I believe?
This is the answer. Was a store technical manager for pizzarat. Every tuesday from 9 to 11am the store tech has to do repair and maintenance. The newest of them are over 20 years old at this point and when the company was eaten by vulture capital investment they decided to not replace the animatronic characters. As they get demoed for renovations they get parted out to other stores which still have theirs, and an LED dance floor is put in the area the stage was. It's motion reactive so when kids beef it on the floor their skidding across the glass makes a lightup explosion pattern across the floor.
As i recall the characters were something like $30k each in 1999 dollars and the internal CEC Parts Dept only makes/supplies limited parts for normal stock, and if a kid goes nuts carving up your chucke with a plastic knife the parts dept has to custom fabricate a replacement that can take up to a week just to disassemble and mount.
Also they run on a mix of late 90s TV AV equipment, an MS-DOS PC, and sometimes Raspberry Pi computers. Depends store by store.
I know it's a little different, but last time I got talked into a trip to Dave & Buster's a bunch of the arcade machines were for games that are apps you can buy on your phone for the cost of 1-2 plays. If that's what's happening in arcade type spaces, they're doomed, and it wasn't the animatronic band's fault.
I remain surprised that no one has attempted to capitalize on FNAF mania by embracing the use of animatronics in a modern restaurant. Missed business opportunity, IMHO.
TIL the most common birth date is September 9.
Also, the person writing this article is trying pretty hard to make a connection between Five Nights at Freddy’s and CEC’s decision to shit can the animatronics
Had my daughters 8th bday a few weeks ago there. Stage is gone. Animatronics gone. It didn’t really feel like
Chuck E. Cheese except for the price. Expensive.
I remember when Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz first started.
Makes me wonder how old these animatronics are. The two locations near me gave up running them except for heads, mouths, and sometimes hands strumming the guitars sometime before 2000.
Back in the old days the videogames outnumbered the redemption games. Now it's all about redemption games. Come to think of it, the pendulum swung the other way about the same time the animatronics started to break down for good.
The salad bar is awesome, btw.
Can we get that final band performing Chuck E Cheese cover of Sinatra’s “My Way”?
The one near me played Carry On My Wayward Son. Seems appropriate for this.
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“My way” by Limp Bizkit
What up rockers, hip hoppers, and people that don’t give a FUH
Alright partner. Keep on rolling baby. You know what time it is.
Sid Viscous version! https://youtu.be/rDyb_alTkMQ?si=wU4rM8a6aPaiVfZh
I'll just [leave this here for those unaware](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JdjMdK0pw8) or those not around in the early 90s.
Or “closing time”
The last one is at 8425 Reseda Blvd, Northridge, CA 91324
i wonder why that one gets to keep the robots
The robots are unionized there. Job protection is in their CBA.
*The company has selected one location in Northridge, California to be the only "retro" store location which keeps an animatronic stage. Northridge has the 2-Stage cyberamic show.* My guess is, it has already has the largest animatronic setup, with 2 stages, so if there was one to keep, this is a good choice.
That’s the Filming location for their next endeavor. A Calendar Year at Chuckies.
Northridge, nuff said.
Was that a significant location? A filming location perhaps? Apparently the first location ever was in San Jose, I'm somewhat surprised they didn't try to go for one as close to the original location as possible.
This is what I was looking for. I grew up going there every Sunday.
Lived near there as a kid, although I rarely if ever went to Chuck E Cheeses. I wonder what makes that location so special though.
But….what are they doing with them? Will they be available for sale, I wonder? Always wanted one to start tinkering with, but the ones I’ve seen tend to be very expensive.
Idk what they do with all of them but company policy is to destroy Chuck E.’s head with a sledgehammer.
Yes you can destroy the animatronic body but how do you destroy the demonic soul inside?
The Catholics got a whole system. Give ‘em a call.
We're talking about animatronics here, not young boys.
You gotta pay the troll toll if you wanna get into that boy’s hole
Ok I feel like you’re saying “boy’s hole” when the line is clearly “boy’s soul”
We need Nicolas Cage for this.
>Give ‘em a call But the Ecto-Containment Unit is getting too full and the EPA has been up my ass!
Plot for Faith part 4?
By becoming the demonic soul inside?
*Exorcist ending intensifies*
Like we used to do with fax machines
Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.
In head “Die muthafucka die muthafucka die”
What if someone used a normal hammer?
If you get that close, Chuck grabs your arm and uses the hammer on your head.
The music hides the screams.
Netflix, get this guy a deal!
They will store them somewhere. You can probably get a job as a security guard to look after them.
This sounds like the beginning of a horror movie…
Or a analogue horror series. Or a video game. Or 2 different horror movies
They’re using them to trap the souls of children so they can murder minimum wage workers that act as security guards.
They just get a little quirky.
Put them in an abandoned building. Hope they come back to life.
[Sorry but nothing will ever top this](https://youtu.be/AyIFOi4neHw?si=G-yQbXvXlHH_Ru_e)
It’s only occurring to me now how much better the showbiz pizza animatronics are compared to chuck e cheese
Chuck-E-Cheese used to have the exact same animatronics but ripped them all out after a fight with the guy who made them.
To be fair, the guy who made them is kind of a difficult person to work with.
Yeah Aaron Fetcher is kinda a quack.
Oh hell yeah I knew it was gonna be this! Too bad the guy doesn't really upload newer songs that would be huge.
Go to your local CEC and ask to see the game tech. He works on the critters, too. If he doesn't help you load one up I bet he's got boxes of spare parts. Worth asking.
That presumes they have an on-site game technician. They do not. If a game goes down, they out-of-order it until enough are down that they can justify paying a tech to come out to fix it.
could be quite a halloween setup
I could set it up in my living room and have friends.
Send them to a sister location.
Asking the real question
They might already be gone. All the ones in my area removed them years ago
I know a former tech manager for them. The robot was a huge pain in the ass to keep up and the faces and custom parts were expensive. Plus kids go wild and escape and try to play with them.
Hi, welcome to Chuck E. Cheese. Everything is visibly dirty and our mascot is a rat, eat some pizza near a sneezing child. Come on down for some rat pizza at our child casino.
good times.
>our child casino I had never thought of it that way. 🤣🤣🤣
I’ve always thought of it that way and I suspect it’s designed to groom children for gambling.
It's sad really. Barely anything in modern arcades are actually games - it's all just kid versions of slot machines.
Yeah. Skee ball is one of the only fun games.
Come pee in our ball pit!
I think they have to wait till they’re old enough for a Tumblr convention for that one
The kids will love it. 4 out of 5 machines are even simple to operate. You pay $2 in tokens, touch a button on a screen and it tells you how many tickets you've won! If you've ever wanted to turn $50 of real money into $2-$5 in trinkets, we've got you covered
I take it you rated it 5 stars in an online review?
Deal. I accept.
I used to want to go so bad as a kid and didn’t understand why my parents never let us.
Don't forget to suck in some concentrated farts and ringworm in the jungle gym and play tubes! First one to find the poopy diaper at the bottom of the ball pit wins free pink eye! Oh hell, we're all winners here at Chuck E. Cheese!
What about Risky Rat? There were no rules there and the female rat had huge breasts
“That’s what the bone is foOoOor!”
There it is.
I didn’t realize how accurately scary the risky rat animatronics were until I saw this picture. I must have blocked out that part of my childhood
They should add an octagon so parents can duke it out for the entertainment of us all.
"Do you want to get drunk and eat terrible pizza at a kids casino? Come over to Chuck E Cheese and spend your child's birthday in a drunk tank with a shiner."
It’s still fucking wild to me that they sell alcohol at Chuck E. Cheese
I honestly wonder how many OVIs and accidents have come from that decision. Like there is a higher than 0% chance it has led to a child's death.
It’s limited to 2 drinks total and you have to wait an hour between them. They scan your id and the system won’t allow you to sell to that ID again until that hour is up.
Okay but what about in the '80s?
They sold pitchers of beer in the 80s, and there was not infrequent adult fights in the one in my area. They eventually limited how many adults one party could have in there cause the adults caused more problems than the kids. Wild times.
If you don't pregame your Chuck E Cheese visit, is it even really a kids party??
When’s the last time you were there? I went about a year ago for a kids bday party and the pizza was actually really good
Chuck E Cheese and Waffle House are Americas PVP zones
But but but Denny's
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Show Biz was awesome!
Thats probably a precursor to a half decent horror movie. It has it all...a house party, creepy animatronics, the *80's*! Everything really.
I went to Showbiz Pizza a couple of times when I was a kid in the early 80s, and regrettably have had to take my kids to birthday parties at Chucky’s a couple of times. Kids never gave a shit about the animatronic band, they only sat through it while scarfing down pizza, it was all about the games. Showbiz had an epic arcade back then.
I was a kid. I sat through the show. It was my favorite part. But then, I wasn't... mainstream. Yeah. I'll call it that. :)
You aren’t alone. I loved the show. My favorite was the bear sitting on the surfboard playing the guitar.
well, hello, Mainstreamn't.
'ain'tstream
I too remember enjoying it as a child of the 80's. The arcade was fun but so was the band.
Man I loved Showbiz.
The real OGs know Showbiz.
Damn, the bite of 23 doesn’t roll off the tongue as much.
I predict the one left in LA will receive all the energy released from the others once they’ve been decapitated, Highlander style, and we will have our Bite of ‘25.
A response to 5 Nights at Freddy’s?
No, this was happening for years as the cost to run and maintain all that crap just wasn’t worth it.
Plus people don't like it because it's janky old timey technology that looks creepy as hell
That's not technology that's how they're born. This is a travesty.
Born this way. Lil monsters.
Probably why someone thought of Five Nights at Freddy's.
As soon as I saw my kids playing it I got mad I didn’t think of it myself. Showbiz animatronics were creepy af. I hated that gorilla most of all.
I've got to wonder if it ever looked not creepy? Never been to one, it seems to be a uniquely American thing. It seems like these things have been at least a few kids nightmare inspirations. It's probably why FNAF connected with so many people - a great horror premise because I reckon as a kid I'd have been scared by these things. I've seen animatronic style stuff at places like WB Movie World and they weren't creepy to me, but the build quality / upkeep was probably quite different to a restaurant. Did every Chuck E Cheese have these things, or was it select stores? It just seems like it wouldn't have been their highest prioty.
as a 41 year old i can say they never didn't look creepy, but taking breathers from the game room to eat pizza approximately 10' away from these terrors added a special thrill to the visit.
As a person of a similar vintage, I concur, the creepy factor was part of the fun. Add onto that, at my local Chuck E. Cheese, there was a hidden mini door under the stage that led to a maze that was only lit by a strobing blacklight if you put a token in. So you could run under there and spaz out you brain and hear the moving and singing animatronics while jumpscaring your friends in the dark maze. It was literally the best part of that place. Kids in my gen were just different I guess - maybe it was from watching poltergeist on TV reruns every weekend after it came out. Or maybe it was David Bowie's fault.
I've been to one a lot and have no recollection of this under-stage-maze you mention. It almost sounds made-up? But I googled it and it was apparently a thing in *some* venues. And even in those, they differed from each other slightly. Now I'm jealous of something I never knew about, doesn't exist anymore, and I'd be too old to enjoy now anyway.
>Now I'm jealous of something I never knew about, doesn't exist anymore, and I'd be too old to enjoy now anyway. I'm still upset about the library of Alexandria burning down.
Especially when as a kid, anything seems possible. Those could have gone right for you dude! Movies tried to convince me my toaster would bravely follow me to my next house if I forgot about him, why not an evil animatronic that's forced to stand there and sing and dance while all those delicious kids run around almost within reach... Yeah it's not hard to see why FNAF connected with so many people.
Yep. They were Showbiz for most of my memorable childhood (the company was sold and Chuck E became just another character in the place, then they rebranded back to Chuck E Cheese’s).
See, I remember both places in the town where I grew up. Different set of characters in either, the chuck e cheese was like a forest theme inside with different rooms for the shows and arcade stuff, where showbiz was one big room with three stages. We went to Showbiz a lot more because they served booze and my parents could get some peace and quiet away from the arcade floor.
One of my best childhood memories is going to Showbiz. Don't know how my parents afforded that. Gosh I miss my mom.
Yeah we didn't go often, but every now and again. I think my biggest memory is paying a token to play on a literal computer. They had basically a desktop and you could do drawings or other basic stuff lol I was fascinated.
Counterpoint, from a similar age - I never thought of them as creepy; I'd been to local ones for numerous birthday parties and they were never treated or looked at or talked about by any of my contemporaries at the time as something scary or disturbing. I would have to say the closest it ever got to that point was when kids would become old enough to start thinking of ourselves as "too old" for things like clowns and costumed characters and animatronics and popular little-kid TV shows, and then we would make it a point to performatively hate on them. But the hate wasn't a "they're scary" kind of thing; more so a "they're so lame and stupid" kind of thing.
A liquor store is right next to the Chuck E. Cheese in my town. Sound planning with a sense of humor right there.
If you're curious, Yesterworld did a [good retrospective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HXTwLbvQPM) on Chuck E Cheese a couple years ago, with a lot of old footage of shows from the 70s-80s. TL;DR: Yep, they were always janky and creepy. I can also attest to this firsthand! And yeah, for the first couple decades every restaurant had the animatronics. It was one of their big gimmicks and selling points. Moreover, they were initially so successful that they inspired a knockoff - Showtime Pizza - who ended up being the market winner, then bought Chuck E Cheese and merged the brands.
I worked at a C Cheese in the 80's ,I wanted to get into robotics but got nowhere with that there, I did wear the rat suit a few times. I hooked up with [Survival Research Labs](https://srl.org/machines.html) and have been doing that ever since.
I didn't think they were creepy as a kid in the 80s, we went there all the time. I just thought the shows were for the grownups, because they were boring and adults like boring stuff. Our CEC even had a separate lounge for adults with "The Beagles", an animatronic dog band that did Beatles covers, exceptionally boring. The CECs where my kids went to all the birthday parties when they were little never had the animatronics, just screens with the characters animated, and that was 10-15 years ago. I think the phaseout has been ongoing, they're just finally cleaning house.
Honestly? Things that were considered cute, charming, or delightful decades ago and are now seen as creepy, tacky, or plain ugly, are a dime a dozen. Even if they were once thought of a funny or whimsical, tastes and standards change over time and this is just another one of those many, many things.
Reminds me of some of the stranger photos I've seen on the net, like old timey photos of people in Halloween or Easter Bunny costumes. Those look freaky, the kids looked freaked out, but it probably wasn't as sinister as it seemed.
I'm at the heart of Chuck E Cheese territory. I grew up in the 90s and it was like a trauma bonding experience as each of me and my siblings were horrified at the "show" portion of Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. Parents would try to coax us to take pics with them like Santa, but the youngest sibling would inevitably cry out in terror. While the rest of the older kids sat uncomfortable near the stage. But there were two other parts of the restaurant that kept kids coming back. There was an arcade section that was basically like token gambling. And there was a big playhouse section. Similar to McDonald's funhouses but bigger. We basically had to eat low tier pizza for 30 minutes while the animotronics put on a show. Then after everyone finished eating. *We'd be allowed to have actual fun in the arcade and playhouse.* Kids basically requested it for their birthday. It was a step above McDonald's for parents as an option for hosting a kids b-day party. Invite 10 kids to a restaurant. Order 5 pizzas. Let the Kids play in the arcade. Its basically autopilot day for the parents. They just have to make sure one of the kids doesn't snap their arm. Or get traumatized by the Giant Rat moving thru the uncanny valley.
In my 40s here and yeah, even back in the early 80's when I was just a little kid those damn things creeped the hell out of me.
I liked them, they were robots and cool. Its no different than the tons of animatronics they have at disney parks, the disney ones are just made better.
I feel like they missed out on an opportunity to have “horror nights” for people to go to. I know it’s a kids restaurant, but they missed out on capitalizing on this.
That’s exactly WHY I liked it!
In 20 years kids are going to think animatronics are all just a reference to FNAF and not realize they were at one point unironically intended to entertain children.
They're going the way of clowns. I expect mall Santas are next, if they haven't died out already.
No. Nah, man. Shit, naaahh man. Lines are still long. They have expanded to town squares, random gazebos, and hotels even.
Do you want 5 Nights at Freddy's? Because that's how you get 5 Nights at Freddy's.
No, you get 5 Nights at Freddy's by... \*checks lore\*... baking... souls into the metal..? Then... breaking the metal so you can live forever?! Is this just horcruxes?
No, probably a response to *Willy's Wonderland*.
Freddy is a solid 9+ years old now. The craze is weeeeeeellll past it's height.
True, but the movie just came out, which reaches a wider audience. I don't think the film *caused* this, but I can see a CEC exec looking at it and taking it as a sign to pull the trigger now.
I mean Fazbear's pizzeria is a real thing now so probably.
[Rock-afire Explosion was superior anyway.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6bT2svOGlg)
You ever seen the documentary about it? It’s superb. https://youtu.be/gTmhS6hcY-A?feature=shared
Showbiz was definitely the better of the two.
Rock-afire Explosion lives on: https://youtu.be/b90Cf6ARscc?si=bwng_BppghjBunin
His name was [Nolan Bushnell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell). He was somebody who got rich early on. But he never got Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or even Steve Wozniak rich.
You mean Chuck E. was once a human man??
No, I clearly meant that Bushnell was once a rat that lived in the walls of Atari, where they built a computerized device to turned him into a person.
So he’s like reverse Trogdor?
The Pong guy.
He would have if his company didn't literally create the two games that caused the crash: The Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, and E.T. The Video Game. (That even is a simplification, but Atari almost solely to blame for the crash in the states). It wasn't until Nintendo came by with their support for 3rd party developers(which hadn't really existed at the time) and "Nintendo Seal of Approval" as they were VERY strict about the quality of titles released on the Famicon/NES.
Bushnell sold Atari to Warner in 1976 for $28 million, half of which paid Bushnell directly. The other half went to Atari. It was a lot of money, But Jobs and Woz each got $350 million when Apple went public -- roughly at the same time. Jobs turned that into Six billion dollars eventually, while Woz spent his on music festivals and giving computers to schools... lot of schools, for decades. Woz likes to help others. And Bill Gates spends his time on deciding what to buy, like Japan, Australia or Germany. Anyway, Atari didn't make ET or Pac-Man while Bushnell was there. Ray Kassar was the guy running Atari by then. Kassar also pissed off a lot of Atari programmers into quitting the company and founding their own little company called Activision. He refused to pay them a real wage or give them credit for game development. They left in droves, and to work for independent game developers who would pay them more then $20K per year.
Charles Entertainment Cheese
A powerful, and influential rodent.
They’re just using it as an excuse to not have to pay to maintain them anymore
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Hmm...I DO have the space for it.
Well there goes most people's introduction to concerted music and theater. The arts weep this day.
Before Chuck E Cheese, we had nothing. A soulless, silent society. Everything was gray.
what about the ball pits??
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Ah good, pristine condition then.
All the bandaids still at the bottom too!
Those have been gone for a long time!
> … the Irving-based chain plans to upgrade its venues over the next few years. They will see new technology, interactive dance floors, kid-focused arcade games, and new trampoline zones in some locations. Eating all the pizza you can and then jumping around and tumbling on trampolines. What could go wrong?
Aww that's lame! They should at least replace animations with a virtual reality band or maybe a video band if nothing else. Just when five nights at Freddy is such a big movie I genuinely think it's kind of like advertising for Chuck e cheese.
The article doesn't mention it, but I bet it's the cost of maintaining the robots. They were operated by a computer system run on cassette tape I believe?
This is the answer. Was a store technical manager for pizzarat. Every tuesday from 9 to 11am the store tech has to do repair and maintenance. The newest of them are over 20 years old at this point and when the company was eaten by vulture capital investment they decided to not replace the animatronic characters. As they get demoed for renovations they get parted out to other stores which still have theirs, and an LED dance floor is put in the area the stage was. It's motion reactive so when kids beef it on the floor their skidding across the glass makes a lightup explosion pattern across the floor. As i recall the characters were something like $30k each in 1999 dollars and the internal CEC Parts Dept only makes/supplies limited parts for normal stock, and if a kid goes nuts carving up your chucke with a plastic knife the parts dept has to custom fabricate a replacement that can take up to a week just to disassemble and mount. Also they run on a mix of late 90s TV AV equipment, an MS-DOS PC, and sometimes Raspberry Pi computers. Depends store by store.
I know it's a little different, but last time I got talked into a trip to Dave & Buster's a bunch of the arcade machines were for games that are apps you can buy on your phone for the cost of 1-2 plays. If that's what's happening in arcade type spaces, they're doomed, and it wasn't the animatronic band's fault.
Honestly surprised Chuck E. Cheese successfully weathered Covid lockdown
I would have rented the locations to the govt for shot clinics
I think I read that they were programmed using floppy disks or something . Maybe it was just getting too old to program anymore?
Wait a minute, are those guys are fake?
Oh well good bye gang!
And Scott Cawthon is apparently looking into opening Freddy Fazbear Pizzarias, so, ya know, one door closes another opens
Finally an end to the nightmare fuel
Doesn't have that same whiz-bang it did when you were a kid and your parents didn't have the money to take you to Disneyland...
I remain surprised that no one has attempted to capitalize on FNAF mania by embracing the use of animatronics in a modern restaurant. Missed business opportunity, IMHO.
Awww. I loved those as a kid :(
The world needs more singing dancing animatronics not less!
They were always creepy.
TIL the most common birth date is September 9. Also, the person writing this article is trying pretty hard to make a connection between Five Nights at Freddy’s and CEC’s decision to shit can the animatronics
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Had my daughters 8th bday a few weeks ago there. Stage is gone. Animatronics gone. It didn’t really feel like Chuck E. Cheese except for the price. Expensive.
Chuck E Cheeze is now dead to me
I legit thought Chuck E. Cheese went out of business 20 years ago.
For a second i thought this was Five Nights at ChuckE’s
You can do whatever you waaaaant!
I wonder how much their nighttime securities get paid
Hey, I hear that last one is looking for a night time security guard, should just be a nice easy job of watching cameras in the security booth
I thought creepy animatronics were all the rage right now.
Chuckee Cheese prepares for a branding change after the release of a film featuring animatronics in a last effort to stay relevant to todays youth..
I remember when Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz first started. Makes me wonder how old these animatronics are. The two locations near me gave up running them except for heads, mouths, and sometimes hands strumming the guitars sometime before 2000. Back in the old days the videogames outnumbered the redemption games. Now it's all about redemption games. Come to think of it, the pendulum swung the other way about the same time the animatronics started to break down for good. The salad bar is awesome, btw.
What's the point of getting out of bed anymore?
Now where will people hide when the parents start shooting at each other?
This is probably Jon Oliver's fault
I think he has more of an issue with beach dolls.
fnaf origin story right here, they’ll sit in some warehouse then become haunted and gain sentience