Chuck E. Cheese: Everything You Didn't Know

What do Atari, Pixar, pizza, beer and rats have in common? Jordan and Alex dive into a suspiciously sticky ball-pit under the uncanny valley gaze of an animatronic rat to go deep on everyone's favorite source of cherished childhood memories and/or trauma: Chuck E. Cheese! They'll discover the roots the chain shares with the iconic video game company behind "Pong," get the heart of the vicious feud between Chuck and his closest competitor, and shine a light on the animatronics wunderkind and vexed utopian who crafted the indelible animatronic band whose songs live on in all our hearts. Also, there will be pizza. And fistfights! Alex won't stop calling the rat "Charles!" Jordan is baffled by all of this! So take a listen to where a kid can be a kid: Too Much Information.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio.
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two alarming yet avuncular animatronic

(00:24):
animals of anodyne apocryphile. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan
Runt in the arms race of alliterative intros, fired another
volley and Jordan's. Today we're doing a rare for us
return to the end More corner of the t m
I universe for a discussion of the uniquely American phenomenon

(00:46):
that merged the culinary, video game and plastic ballpit industries
and briefly revolutionized childcare as we knew it. That's right,
We're talking about Charles Entertainment Cheese, or as he's better known,
Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza rat and animatronic nightmare on

(01:08):
Canny Valley Horror Show. You know, he's called Charlie in
Australia because Chuck is so synonymous with vomit there. I
didn't know that. I did not know that, but you
know what I feel like, I always see maybe I'm
just imagining this, but the animatronic and cartoon versions of
Chuck e Chees giving the thumbs up, and in Australia
the thumbs up is basically the middle finger. So well,

(01:28):
Charles is what a little stinker he is in Australia,
he's got a little rat bastard. Um. You know, I
have such fond memories of attending birthday parties at the
Charles Central Pennsylvania abode and forming my lifelong attachments to
music and pizza and rats. I don't have any traumatic

(01:51):
memories from this. I but do you? I have very
little memories at all of this because I, um, my
hometown in Central my Stitusetts was very spoiled for wholesome activities.
Um against tiny, tiny New England town right come from.
I think we just got our second stoplight like a
few years ago. We didn't even have a grocery store

(02:12):
for a lot of my very early years. But we
had a full scale, hundred year old amusement park called
Whaleham Park, complete with water slow yes you've talked about
this before here. We had a drive in movie theater.
We had not one, but two bowling alleys. We had
a video arcade, and then a mall nearby that also
wasn't in town, but I had another video arcade too,
mini golf places, and a roller rink. All of these

(02:35):
were ten minutes from my house. Basically, um, exactly. None
of these are open anymore. The last of them, the
Bowling Alley, closed last year, which is you know, this
is where we punched in Joni Mitchell's laugh. Um paved
Big Gel Taxi corner. Yes, paved paradise, which in my
case was a combination bowling alley and mini golf and

(02:56):
put up I don't know what they put up, but anyway,
So yeah, whenever I tell my friends about the they're
always like, oh wow, and the one do you love
the fifties and sixties because that's basically when you grew
up And it's true. Um, so I really wasn't exposed
to the original pizza rat. The big corporate kid's birthday
emporium in my area at the time was called Discovery Zone.

(03:17):
You have Discovery zones, okay, well, no Chucky Cheese beat
Discovery Zone. Discovery Zone was a big everybody came at
Charles Man everyone there, you know, and and he killed
he crushed them all yeah, God, I mean rats, dude. Yeah, no,
Discovery Zone actually flowed has failed, and Charles hung on
I'm gonna call him Charles. Yeah, I mean it was funny.

(03:41):
Once all the mom and pop amusements in town started
shutting down. When I was in like high school, a
Chuck E Cheese did open in our local mall, but
I really only went in there when I was working
on like a babysitter and brought kids that I was
watching in there, and uh, yeah, I don't know. My
main thought, after years of going to all these kind
of rinky dink um places, was that Chuck E Cheese
has kind of seemed sort of souls soulless. Yeah, I

(04:05):
thought it was a little soulas. And the pizzas real bad,
feel bad. And there's the whole rumor that they like
recycled pizza, yes, which has been debunked, thank you. But
if you look at the pizzas, like none of the
slices fit together, yeah, it looks like they're taken from
I sure. I mean, yes, there's a horrifying Uncanny Valley

(04:26):
aspect to any animatronic stuff, But you know, I hope
to disprove that assessment. With this episode, which shows how
much blood, sweat, and tears went into pizza. Wasn't animatronic,
High pizza was real, and none was all together. It's
not a circle. They're from different pies. Well. From the

(04:47):
company's roots in one of the most iconic video game
brands of all time, to the semi obscure Animatronics whiz
kid responsible for the famous robotic band who later blew
up a unk of his inventory trying to invent an
alternative cooking fuel, to the horrifying Lea dickenziean official backstory
of the rat. Here's everything you didn't know about Chuck

(05:10):
E Cheese. I never thought I would hear you could
say that it's never gonna get old. Uh. Any discussion
of Charles must begin with the man who birthed him,
Nolan K. Bushnell. Bushnell was born in Clearfield, Utah, to

(05:32):
a middle class family who are predictably members of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints a k.
The Mormons, and he bounced around Utah universities in the
early to mid sixties, eventually graduating with a bachelor's in
electrical engineering. As a young Mormon, Bushnell's dream is to
become an imagineer, Disney's catch all term for its theme
park designers and architects, and he worked at Lagoon Amusement Park,

(05:54):
about eighteen miles north of Salt Lake City to put
himself through college. He was made manager of the game's
department there and familiarized himself with the ins and outs
of both the earliest forms of arcade games and the
theme park business in general. But Bushnell up sticks from Utah,
moved with his first wife, Paula, and their two daughters
to California in nine to follow his bliss. This is

(06:17):
when we punch in uh fortunate song, or if you're
going as if well, we always punch in credence. That
just works for everything. Unable to get hired at Disney,
Bushnell took a job at a division of Ampex called
Video File in Santa Clara. He explained to Medium in eighteen,

(06:39):
I became infatuated with a game of Go, and we
drive to San Francisco every other weekend and spend basically
most of Sunday morning playing Go at the old Buddhist
church by Bush Street. Did you know Go? I don't
explain to me about Go. It's an old game from
Chinese antiquity, incredibly hard to play it. It almost looks
like checkers. Um you have black and white little um. Oh,

(07:02):
I've seen this and I think I've tried to play
it before. But it was very smart, smart, very hard.
But it had like a resurgence in the sixties as
part of you know, anything that was from Eastern cultures
was examined in California around that time, and it was
like a real like hippie thing. Yeah, yeah, that's scans.
And while at one of these Sunday morning go marathons,

(07:24):
Bushnell met a guy who worked at the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Lab and he said to medium. One day we
got to talking and he said, have you ever heard
of Space War? I was like space War. The first
time I played Space War was at the University of
Utah in n Or nineteen sixty six. We left and
drove up to the Artificial Intelligence Lab and played until

(07:47):
all hours of the night. Space War to the Unfamiliar
is a space combat video game developed in two and
written for the newly installed d E C P d
P one computer at m I T. It was a
huge hit in the tight knit early programming community of
the nineteen sixties, and since its code was in the
public domain, was widely recreated on other systems, and so

(08:10):
bush now seeking to recreate the thrill of playing Space
War on a smaller and therefore more monetize herble scale,
in October nine enlisted a guy named Ted Dadby because
he was really really good at analog circuitry in Bushnell's words,
and roped in a company called Nutting Associates the only

(08:31):
which phrasing guys come on, which was the only corn
operated machine manufacturer west of the Rockies, and by nineteen
seventy nine the first coin operated arcade video game, Computer
Space made this nascent partnership three point five million dollars
and empowered them to start a Torii, which is named

(08:54):
for a Japanese term borrowed from the game of Go,
which is it basically equivalent of saying check in chess.
My sister's college dorm was on Nutting Street, and they
kept having to replaced the sign because the guys from
the frat houses would keep going up and stealing it. Yeah,
which tracks by recruiting their first engineer, Alan alcorn Atari

(09:19):
set out to develop a workable arcade game that would
be the springboard for a more commercial concept. The game
they developed, though as a means to a later end,
became one of the most iconic video games of all
time upon its release in two. That was a little
game called Pong. It is nuts how old Pong is? Like,

(09:39):
it's just crazy to me to think that they had
screen based video games. Yeah, that's so crazy to me.
What's Bushnell's law? Jordan's This law is uh. It's an
aphorism generally attributed to the Atari founder Nolan Bushnell says,
all the best games are easy to learn and difficult

(10:01):
to master. They should reward the first quarter and the
hundredth quarter. Oh it's like life. Really. Yeah, But in
the back of Bushnell's mind, it all came back to
the roar of the grease paint and the smell of
the crowd. I think that's backwards, but that's it's not.
I googled it. I googled it. Roar the crowd and
the smell of the grease paint. That's the correct phrase.

(10:22):
But the this is a joke, Yes it is. It's
a that's the musical. The musical is called come On,
You're a theater dork. It's musical that has the it's
the spoonerism. It has it flipped. It's called the roar
of grease paint. The smell of the crowd. Huh, come on,
come on, that's the that's the musical. That feeling good.
They need a Simon song. I okay, and it comes

(10:45):
from Wow. Come on, damn it, run dog. Bushnell's associate, Daphne,
He said, no one had this brilliant idea. He's a
Carney guy, Back Mountains Carney, and he thought a pizza
part are carnival type pizza parlor would be a great
thing to do. He liked that kind of atmosphere and

(11:05):
he always wanted to build a restaurant that had that
in it. And Dad they added a Fast Company in seventeen.
His whole thing was a pizza parlor with talking beer barrels.
You imagine calling anyone a back Mountain carny mountain. Can
I forget how that relationship ended. I'm guessing not well.

(11:26):
Bush Now rather loftily explained his pet project to Fast
Company said, throughout history, there was a celebration, and the
celebration had food, drink, and games without exception, whether you
were talking about the summer Solstice with primitive Man to
the circuses in Rome. There was always an entertainment element.
I always felt there was something that was lacking in restaurants.

(11:48):
I wanted to add a dimension of fun to the
act of having a meal and a rat. Well, okay,
well we we we can't really have people killed like
we could in gladiatorial times, so so what about a
robot rats the next best thing? Bushnell told Mel magazine.
Atari was selling coin operated games for one thousand, five

(12:11):
hundred dollars to two thousand dollars, and during their lifetime
they were in fifty dollars. I felt that I wanted
to be on that side of the equation as well,
but I didn't want to compete with the people I
was selling games to who are already in the existing locations.
I had two goals to create a big, freestanding arcade
and to have a place that was kid friendly. We
knew kids wanted to play the games, but they had

(12:33):
no place to do that, as bars weren't possible and
arcades were teenage hangouts, and Bushnell I supposedly at one
point towards with the idea banning teenagers altogether from what
would become Chuck E Cheese, and I sort of had
that sense myself as an eighteen year old bringing the kids,
like baby sat at the Chuck E Cheese. I got
the sense that I wasn't supposed to be there, But
I was eighteen and in the suburbs, and maybe I

(12:54):
just didn't feel like I belonged anywhere. Now poetic, No,
I mean, the whole the whole history of arcades is
really interesting. And you know, they evolved from like the
car They did evolved from the carny atmosphere and sort
of the midway and boardwalk style stuff. But you know
they did become um basically training grounds for kids to
who couldn't yet drink. So there is an interesting liminal

(13:17):
age zone there. As far as the American cultural conception
of teenagers now with rats, you know, pinball was illegal
in New York City from like the forties to the seventies,
right because they were just like, we can't give teenagers
a reason to congregate. Well that and also it's a
training crown for bars and gambling. Really good, good, I say.

(13:42):
But back to Bushnell, He's quoted as saying, I decided
pizza was the right food because it had a delay
time that would allow for gameplay. Every food has delay time.
I mean, it's like pizza. I don't know, cheap any
idiot can make it. It's hard to screw up. I'm
gonna go with that instead, Bushnell continued. Back then, the

(14:05):
most successful pizza parlor in the Bay Area was Pizza
and Pipes, which had a deconstructed Wurlitzer theater organ It
was extremely successful when they had an organist, but it
was quiet when there was no organist. Kids love organs.
Everyone knows this. Kids love pipe or kids. So sorry, Yeah,

(14:30):
I wanted entertainment that didn't involve labor. When I took
my kids at Disneyland and I saw the Tiki Room,
I felt that could be the solution, a mechanical, computer
operated entertainment system. All this seems way more complicated than
it has to be. Well in a way, I mean
it's really the r text of every tech streaming middleman. Now.
They're like, I want the money from art to come

(14:52):
to me without the trouble of artists. I want people
to come to my place and spend money because they're
interested in live music. I don't want to deal with musicians.
You know who does well fair uh. Funnily enough, though
other than pizza and pipes, musical pizza parlors had an
extensive history in the Bay Area. Shakey's Pizza. Do you

(15:14):
know about Shakey's. I don't know about shake He's, No,
let me tell you about. Shakey's Pizza was founded in
Sacramento in nineteen fifty four by Sherwood Shakey Johnson and
Ed Plumber. Johnson was World War Two veteran whose nickname
came from the nerve damage he sustained after abount with
malaria front of the pod. Nerve damage. Uh. Johnson played

(15:34):
traditional jazz piano in Shakey's to entertain patrons, and this
evolved into him hiring musicians to play for them. And
this is actually funny that it turns into that Shakey's
launched a renaissance in traditional like Dixieland jazz in the
Bay Area. They had a radio program that popularized the
music as well. And Shakey's Pizza is named in the

(15:57):
American Banjo Museum in oak Lahoma for hoping to popularize
banjo's throughout the mid century. Ah yeah, and they they.
The other thing that they did was they would have
the repertoire, the lyrics to the repertoire that the band
is playing printed on their menus. So the whole idea
is that you would go there and there will be
a band playing, and then everybody could kind of join
in and sing along. Dinner theater. Yeah, it reminds me

(16:21):
of that Italian joint where the Wonders play and that
thing you do. Yeah, like the classic red sauce joint. Yea,
all that stuff, all these dinner clothes, all that stuff
was so popular back before, like CBGBs made combining food
service and music disreputable, but like, yeah, bring that back,
bring back the copa man. Oh, I know I can

(16:41):
still some bum that closed. Although I would imagine during
our fifteen twenty years in New York City it was
not a fun place to be. Yeah, the bad kind
of rat um. By the end of nineteen seventy three,
Dabney had left the company that they had found it together.
He told NPR that Has Bushnell took over more and
more of the company's operation and direction. Quote that was

(17:04):
the end of our relationship. But in six bush now
then the sole owner of the company, sold Atari to
Warner Compation billion. He wanted to continue funding and developing
what would become the Atari, but he also wanted to
establish his rat based pizza empire. Dabney continued to the

(17:25):
Computer History Museum and his interview. Bushnell finally got the
money from Warner Communications, and he decided to do that
pizza time theater thing. And so he'd asked me if
I wanted to go in with him. I said no, no, no, no,
I'd rather be your friend than your partner. So he says, okay, well,
at least go take a look at my pizza parlor
and tell me what you think. So I did, and
it was crappy. It was dirty, it was noisy, the

(17:47):
pizza wasn't very good, and this was a brand new place.
So I came back and I told him it was dirty.
He said, I'll take care of that. I'll fix that.
I said, also, it was so damn noisy, I couldn't
tell when my pizza was ready. And the pizza is
not very good. He says, oh, mediocre pizza is good enough.
That's true, as every pizza parlor located in any amount

(18:10):
of square pakreage near a bar will tell you, yes,
it is. According to article and s f Gate, Bushnell
spent two point five million on R and D for
his pizza, his rat pizza idea with a company that
made animatronics. You know, I'm being a bit disous, being

(18:32):
a bit disingenuous here because actually, as of nineteen seventy four,
he wanted to call this Coyote Pizza because he wanted
these costumed characters and he thought that Coyote would work.
And so this is a very funny for what for
the bit? For the bid for the bit? Jordan, he
did this all for the bit? No, he was I

(18:53):
think there's I mean, yes, he's like a tech doric loser,
but there's something very sweet to me about being like
about like working at a theme park as a kid
and wanting to be like a Disney imagineer and everything else,
but everything else in your life just getting going back
to this dream, Like, yeah, I made a tari. I
made like one of the most successful video game companies

(19:15):
of all time. I've made scads of money, But what
I really want to do he's the animatronic pizza parlor.
I had no idea well, first of all, that Atari
was an American based company. I assumed it was Japanese.
And I also had no idea that the guy who
created a tari had anything to do with let alone

(19:36):
founded well passionate about chuck cheese, about pizza rat. Now
we're putting the we're putting the horse ahead of the car,
the cart ahead of the horse. Here. But what people
of our generation no is Chucky Cheese is actually derived
from the Chucky cheese competitor that sprung up, So let

(19:56):
me finish. He was at the International Association of Amusement
Parks and Attractions convention when he saw what he thought
was a coyote costume. He ordered one, and when it
arrived in the mail and he started displaying it to
ATARI employees, was shocked to find out that what he

(20:18):
had ordered was a rat costume. Coyotes, rats, I don't
know animals, so funny to me. He was like that, guys,
it's a coyote. And apparently they pulled the bottom half
of this costume out and saw the long, slithery naked
rat tail and we're like, Nolan, it's a rat costume.
But he kept on, he kept he kept it, kept

(20:39):
into his office, named it Rick Rat because he was
not an ideas man, and this was This costume was
occasionally donned by Atari employees at various company functions, so
Coyote Pizza had to go away. Uh Dabney, who was
still developing the concept at this point, brought in a
guy named Gene Landrum to help. Uh jeem is this

(21:01):
electronics gaming veteran who had done the rollout planned for
the attar And he told Mail Magazine, I went to
Disneyland to do some research. They had hundreds of games,
and you could go to the park and see all
these animatronics, like the Country Bear Jamboree, and of course
they had Mickey Mouse. So I said to myself, I
got it. They have Mickey Mouse, I can do Chucky Cheese.

(21:21):
It sounds the same. So that's where I got it from.
And Nolan had a rat costume in his office, so
it worked out. They also say there's something in that.
The repeated line is when you say Chucky cheese, you
smile three times. Yeah, that's some corporate speak. Another factor
in changing the name, Landrum explained Fast Company, was we're

(21:42):
making this a kid's place. We can't have a rat.
A rat is too predatory and too lethal. Bushell did
this oral history for the Smithsonian and he said, so,
I said, Rick Rat's pizza went into the marketing department.
They said, no way, They said, rats are dirty. This
is a restaurant. You can't even say rat and food.

(22:03):
At the same time, I said, well, okay, can it
be a rat, but we'll just de emphasize his rat nous.
They said, well, maybe that'll work. How much of your
life has been de emphasizing your rat tycle none. Um.
We could say in some ways that Gene was the
founder of Chuck E Cheese, pushing all told fast Company

(22:25):
because he was the guy I hired to bring Chucky
Cheese into fruition. He was the guy that found the
pizza recipes, He rented the facility, hired the first pizza.
He was very, very instrumental. Lander also wrote the menu,
designed the floor plan of the first restaurants, did all
the stuff like revenue streams and gross margins. Well, Bushnell
was sitting around playing with the rat costume. Well, I

(22:49):
have I have a question, and that the term spirit
animal gets thrown around way too much these days. But
rats for you. Having known you as long as I have,
it really seems to be Yes, it seems to have
a special place for you. Wrote a song several in
the band that we were playing. Yes through several I
love you rat that. I want to ask you more

(23:10):
about what rats mean to you. Well, they're survivors first
of all. Uh, you know, and I don't know. They
were just well represented in media that I consumed growing up.
I often think of Templeton, Templeton, Yes from Charlotte's Web, Ratigan,
Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective, voiced by Vincent Price,

(23:31):
Christopher Lee some horror icon did that? Uh no, you know,
I don't know. I'll say they're cute. They're cute guys.
I like them. And like I said, tenacious, do you
relate to rats? Oh? Very much, so, very much so.
So Yeah, well well represented, diverse range of of rats
in children's media. Um, that's the big three, Templeton, Ratigan

(23:54):
and Chuck E Cheese. Yeah. What about is the father
sounded Holy Spirit? Which is which media rats you've mentioned?
Oh gosh, Um, Templeton's probably the first, right, So he's
the father? Okay, rat Agan the Holy Ghost because it
sounds cool. Yeah, wow, Yeah, that's your new band name,

(24:17):
Holy Rat Ghost Rat, Holy Go Rat Rat Agan the
Holy Ghost Rat again the Holy Ghost verbal contract. That's
a trademarked We're going to take a quick break, but
we'll be right back with more too much information in
just a moment. Anyway, Yeah, let's get this back on

(24:50):
the track. Well. Guided by a current copy of the
International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Directory, Landrum also
started sus sing out who would build the animatronics at
this restaurant would be anchored around by virtue of being
the only company that responded to his request, Harold gold
Branson's Fantasy Forest Manufacturing was tapped, despite their primary expertise

(25:15):
being mascot costumes rather than animatronics. So they just had
all these mascot costumes. Just almost stick some pistons in.
There'll be fine. Yeah, okay uh. After bringing the gold
Branson Corporation on board to create the costumes and animated puppets,
Landroom hired Bob Allen Black, who was an artist who

(25:37):
worked previously with Atari. Bush No essentially handed him to
Rick the rat costume and said, yeah, make everything look
like this. Ah. Starry artists Bob Flammate designed Chucky Cheese
and other characters. Why engineers such as Larry Emmons and
Ron Miller of Atari's Grass Valley California, think take. Scian
Engineering provided the mechanical designs for them. Mike Hatcher programmed

(26:01):
many of the robots movements, which were powered bynumatic pistons
and triggered by computer controls from signals on a prerecorded
reel to real tape that could be shipped to each store.
At first, the characters were essentially animatronic portraits that spoke
and moved out of frames mounted on the wall, but
then animated torsos were seen from the waist up, and

(26:22):
finally the full body robotic band, which didn't debut until
many years after Chuck E. Cheese first opened. The first
voice of Charles was John Woodlocke, who modeled the rast
demeanor after a nineteen forties film character named Mugs McGuinness
played by Leo Gorsey in the East Side Kids. I
might have a fact about this guy? Is that where

(26:44):
we get the classic like, oh a wise guy, A
like that kind of like joysy accent? I think so? Uh.
Leo Gorsey was um somebody who was initially included in
the Sergeant Pepper montage, but he refused to allow his
license to be included unless they paid him for under
Bucks and the Beatles didn't want to start a precedent,

(27:05):
so they airbrushed him out, and I believe he's on
the back row. You can just see like a little
bit of blue where clearly a head should be, and
that was where he was. I believe there are a
few other people that they cut out. Yeah, they cut
out Gandhi because they were worried that it was just
so soon after the bigger than Jesus um controversy that
they thought having Gondhi on an album cover would be

(27:27):
a bad idea because Chuckie Cheese later got in trouble
for saying he was bigger than Jesus. They had a
Brian Wilson mannequin that they didn't add, and uh, I
think they had a cut up made of Hitler from
John And for the same reason that they didn't put
Gandhi in, they decided it's probably not the best idea anyway,

(27:50):
as the ark of the universe must turn to my
beloved Beatles. Anyway, the original voice of Chuckie Cheese based
his voice on that character from you Know. On old
forties gangster movie East Side Kids, originally Charles Entertainment, Cheese
was pictured holding a cane and a cigar with a
cigar incorporated into both a walk around costume and the

(28:12):
animatronic version of the character, but it was officially discontinued
in nineteen eighty when Chuck E. Cheese gave up smoking
during the Great American Smokeout campaign. You know that giant
rat we have walking around cracking wise in a Jersey accent.
Lose the cigar. That's the most off putting thing about
him anyway. The original voice of Chuck E. Cheese, John Woodluck,

(28:33):
voiced him from ninety seven through four and on the
original demo Real I Guess. He performed the voices for
all of the characters at Chuck E. Cheese, but production
decided to go with different voice actors to decrease the
amount of post production work required, and Woodluck was allowed
to choose which character who wanted to keep working on,
and perhaps wisely, he chose the titular rat. Mike Hatcher

(28:56):
was the man behind the original portrait style animatronics, but
chl told The Atlantic Mike was a really good programmer,
a puppeteer, and a screenwriter. He wrote and designed the
authoring system that programmed the units. He'd sit back with
the Impressario and programmed the movements one at a time,
basically to coordinate with the tape. San Jose Mercury News
ran a short story about hatch In that revealed it

(29:18):
took him three hours of programming for every one minute
of animation. There were often two movements going on at
once during the shows. And also Hatchard worked the graveyard
shift because he had to troubleshoot all this stuff after
it closed. You have to see what have you seen?
Like the original reginal original post one. Oh yeah, they're amazing.
They're so beautiful. I love them. I want this in

(29:39):
my homewman. I just said to yeah, it looks like
a drag queen. It looks like a rat drag queen
like with the lidded the heavy lidded eyes. M beautiful. Uh.
All the characters were built on neumatics, i e. Pushing
compressed air through a series of tubes. Factories are run

(30:03):
on pneumatic Bushnell told the Atlantic components are cheap and
they never wear out. They just run and run and run.
It's probably the most robust motion technology in the world.
You start, who called the Internet a series of tubes?
God it was I don't remember. Ted Stevens, Senator Ted
Stevens from Alaska. You start with the armature and then

(30:23):
you dress it, he continued, And if you want some
fun nightmare, if you you should google Chucky Cheese armature. Uh,
pretty much. They were the same. Inside. There were two
different jaws if you're a dog versus Mr Bunch. If
you were a snout animal, you had a different jaw.
We also had one for beaks. They just look like
like furbies if you take the skin off. I did

(30:45):
google Chucky Cheese armature, and I wish I hadn't good
Uh fun. Fact in Insider reached out to Chucky Cheese
Is corporate office for the official backstory of the name
Charles Entertainment Cheese and was told, Unfortunately, we don't believe
that Charles has ever been on any official literature or
documentation we can provide to you by public relations manager

(31:06):
Christal DuPont I googled this woman to make sure this
wasn't a hoax. She has quoted in all of these
articles about people getting in fights at Chuck e Cheeses.
She's just like, we do not get Charles does not
condone violence. Um, yeah, yeah, he clearly does. But she
pointed the writer to an official online biography of Mr.
Cheese reportedly written in two thousand four to aid in

(31:29):
a rebrand of the character, when he was redesigned more
mouse like, thus betraying his roots. The rough outlines of
it are as follows, and I'm paraphrasing Chuck E. Cheese
grew up in an orphanage called St. Marin Era's where
It's pretty good right. Where As an orphan, he was
unaware of his own birthday but loved celebrating others. When

(31:52):
he became of age, he moved to New York City,
where he was homeless and sought shelter in a pizzeria
where the owner attempted to kill him before hearing his
beautiful singing voice, and subsequently decided to keep the rat
employed to sing to customers sounded like Tony Clifton Bennett
all right whoa. But during his first ever performance, Charles

(32:16):
got stage fright and he was booed by the crowd
until he saw a child wearing a birthday crown and
was moved to sing beautifully. The crowd cheered, and the
pizzeria became the most popular spot in town. The last
line of the story is Chuck E Cheese hasn't stopped
singing or smiling since it's like a star was born.

(32:39):
Oh that's like as bad as the Sonic Bible. Wow,
well it was Chuck E Cheese is time to shine.
The first Chuck E Cheese Pizza Time Theater opened on
May seventy seven in San Jose, attended by Mayor Chanet Grave.

(32:59):
It was a big thing. Like he was he They
were like the guy from Monopoly, from Monopoly, the guy
from a Torii is opening a like essentially like an
amusement park in San Jose. It's a big deal. Come on.
It operated of a five thousand score foot former brokerage building,
was loaded with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars worth
of arcade games and what is referred to as quote

(33:22):
a huge toy Swiss cheese for kids to bounce around on.
And of course Charles himself. Early newspaper stories couldn't decide
on his exact background there, perhaps baffled by his accent
as West Coasters. Uh. The U p I story reads,
there's also a character costumes. There's a there's also a

(33:46):
character costumes as a giant rat called Chuck E Cheese
who escorts customers to the table with a Brooklyn accent.
The Sacramento b whoever referred to him as Chuck, a
street wise Jersey rat. All right, you can't be both. Pushnell,
no doubt, thrilled that his long held most impossible dreams

(34:07):
finally become a reality, told The Atlantic, I chose pizza.
He's explaining the method to his madness. I chose pizza
because of the light time and the build schedule, very
few components and not too many ways to screw it up.
I didn't have any preconceived idea that I knew how

(34:28):
to run a restaurant, but I knew simple was better. Again,
it's it's Bushnell's law for video games translated into restaurants.
Kind of the reason for doing the animals, believe it
or not, was not for the kids, he continued. It
was meant to be a head fake for the parents.
Kids are really smarter at knowing how to play their parents,
and the kids knew if they said I'm gonna go

(34:50):
to Chuck E Cheese and play the games, the parents
would just see themselves as spending money. But if they
said I want to go see Chucky Cheese Entertainment and
it's free, they'd be good to go. The other thing
was that we want of the parents that have something
to amuse themselves while the kids were in the game room.
If you listen to the dialogue by these animatronic figures,
it was fun, edgy stuff, kind of like toy story

(35:11):
written as much for the parents as the kids. Yeah,
there was actually quite a divide between Um. Like he
talks about some of the earliest scripts were like a
little bit more risque like they had like like more
vaudeville humor, like Chucky Cheese was kind of a dick
to some of his like band like other guys in
the band, everybody would like he would like crack like
like rip On, I think like the hill Billy Dog.

(35:33):
Um And they actually at one point and had a
separate room for adults. They had like a separate lounge.
They had. The separate room had a performances by Dolly Dimples,
who is a hippopotamus keyboardist, singer with breasts who sang
torch songs and bantered with people cigar cigarettes, Yes, yes, exactly.

(35:55):
Despite the apparent success of the Pilot Store, it caused
friction between Warner Brothers in Bushnell. They didn't like him,
as they saw it shirking his Atari duties to focus
on his pizza rat John ellis Atari's VP of consumer
engineering at the time, told Fast Company that Bushnell had
told him around ninety six to investigate creating a robot
that can mix drinks and bring them to you, which

(36:19):
I love um Bushnell told Fast Company, I had spent
a lot of money and a lot of engineering time
on a lot of projects that I thought were the future,
and Warner didn't want to have anything to do with them.
So in June of Bushnell bought the first Pizza Time
Theater as it was called them in San Jose and
all of its intellectual property rights from Warners for a
mere five hundred thousand dollars and opened a second location,

(36:42):
nearly four times the size of the flagship that was
at the time the country's largest pizza parlor. They thought
he was a sucker, Bushnell's friend and fellow Atari pioneer
Alan Alcorn told Fast Company. But Bushnell quickly incorporated the
business into Pizza Time Theater, Inc. And began expanding his empire.
In fact, by nove Ber, he'd left a Tory completely
to focus on Pizza Time Theater, which he did by

(37:04):
pursuing franchising deals across the country, one massive one in
particular with Bob Brock, president of Topeka in Management, who
had made his fortune as the largest franchise ee of
Holiday Inn hotels in the United States. Remember that name, folks.
During nine and nineteen seventy nine, Bushnell invested one and

(37:25):
a half million dollars of his own money into Pizza
Time Theater for two additional locations. But Trouble, But Casey,
case and Boys. But Trouble was on the horizon for Bushnell,
Charles and the Nesson Empire. They were building together well.
Eighties saw the advent of arcade classics like Missile Command,
Berserk Centerpede, and perhaps the most famous of all, pac Man.

(37:49):
In the next year of its pixelated life, pac Man
would earn over one billion dollars in quarters in the
United States, much of that at You Guessed at Pizza parlors.
Video game designer Washington University professor Dr Anne Bogost wrote
at The Atlantic in as tavern culture gave way to
the video arcade of the late seventies and early eighties,

(38:09):
secondary pursuits like ordering food gave way to the primary
pursuit of additional game play. Chuck E. Cheese was an arcade.
It's games encouraged continual play and cross cabinet play. It
was a restaurant. Food and drink drew players to the
locale and kept them there longer. And it was a
mid lay. Players collected tickets from games of skill and
chance like ski ball, in hopes of exchanging them for prizes. Again,

(38:33):
this is just so fascinating me. I mean, the guy
created video games and then jumped head first into like
the arcade culture of the time. It's it's just so culturally,
it's so interesting. Anyway, I'm doing all this, this, all
this throat clearing is to explain why Charles quickly had
a target on his disgusting rat. Back in the early eighties,

(38:53):
the hip off of pizza time theater proliferated. You could
visit Bullwinkle's Family Restaurant, Major Magic's All Star Pizza Celebration,
Station fair Play, Pizza Theater, and Razmatazz, all of these
that have like theater or pizza or celebration in the name.
And some dude was like, we'll call it Razmatazz. I mean,

(39:17):
that's that's very theatrical. I'm more interested in the fair
Play Pizza theater because I just think about Lee Harvey
Oswald's fair Player for Cubic Committee, not the reference I
would have gone with. But yes, and of course among
many others. There were many of these um but the
most famous one is Showbiz Pizza Palace. Show Biz opened

(39:39):
their first location on March third, and they are the
true villain of this story. Remember remember from a few
paragraphs ago, Bob Brock, the holiday inn magnate who signed
a deal with Bushnelt franchise Chucky Cheeses. Well while visiting
the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Convention in
New Orleans in Rock met a guy named Aaron Fect

(40:03):
Factor is the Nicola Tesla, insane misunderstood, got his timing
all wrong, genius of the animatronics industry. And also this story.
This kid founded a TV repair company at the age
of eleven, which subsequently failed because he couldn't lift the
TVs he was repairing. And then in nineteen seventy three,
at the height of the oil crisis, when he was nineteen,

(40:26):
had this pie in the sky idea to design a
car that would get ninety miles to the gallon. He
called it the Jutta, and it was essentially a glorified
golf cart. It had three wheels and it was a ridiculous,
ridiculous thing. You have to look up the concept arc
for the Jutta. But he was also like a very

(40:47):
sweet utopian idealist, and while trying to fund the Jutta uh,
he turned to a variety of ideas to finance this,
one of which led him to discover his true talent,
which was design and manufacturing of animatronics. Factor also claims
to have invented the Whack a Mole the arcade game.

(41:08):
His story was that he was at the nineteen six
i A a p A Convention and someone pointed him
at this Japanese gaming company's booth where they had a
whack a Mole like machine, and they were like, that
thing is a piece of crap. We could make some
real money if we designed a better version of that.
So Factor builds a better whack a Mole machine using nomadics,

(41:29):
and then claimed that the credit was stolen out from
under him by the guy who contracted him to do
that work. But that's kind of contested, and also neither
here nor there um, but yeah, he basically created a
company called Creative Engineering, Inc. Which took off, was doing
millions of dollars of business out of Orlando selling animatronic
characters to theme parks. And he's such a sweet boy.

(41:53):
A bit of an egomaniac, but a sweet boy. There's
two Orlando Sentinel article where he waxed about ending four
were in fuel dependency with solar power, using industrial automation
and robots to create a three day, six hour a
day work week for the working class, and then basically
pitches the modern Internet as we know it, And this

(42:14):
quote is wild. He said, we would like to pioneer
and invest in large amounts of money in pioneering a
central organized network in tying home computers together. What we
want is for you to be able to type in
water heater and get up a list of people who
can sell you one or repair one, along with a
better Business Bureau report or consumers report. Then, after he

(42:37):
got out of the pizza animatronics game, he invented a
secure email device called the Anti Gravity Machine, which is
basically a way to send a lockdown, ultra scure emails.
The guy was just this kind of like, I said Nicola.
Tesla like wild eyed tech innovator who just never made
a lot of money. I mean, he did at one point,
but has never really kind of you never got his

(43:00):
Tesla coil is what I'm trying to say here. Anyway,
at the ninety eight i p A convention, he debuted
his real triumph, the wolf Pack five, a group of
animatronics singing animals inspired by the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I met Bob Brock at the end of nineteen seventy nine,
and at that time he'd already signed a deal with
Nolan Bushnell to build two D and eight Pizza Time theaters.

(43:22):
Factor told mel magazine. I'd previously met Nolan Bushnell in
ninety seven and ninety eight, and he'd wanted to sell
him my animatronics for his Pizza Time theaters, but I
didn't trust him. I figured he'd just buy one character
from me, get it to California, and then reverse engineered
and start copying me, so he'd never buy another character
from me. So I refused to make a long story short.

(43:44):
Fector says that when Brock saw that there was someone
out there making better singing animatronic animals than Bushnell, he
decided to back out of his deal with Bushnell and
joined forces with Fector to launch a Chucky Cheese competitor.
At the crux of his argument was essentially the fact
that he claimed that Bushnell downplayed Aaron Fector to him.

(44:04):
He said, Hey, I heard about this guy, Aaron Fector,
who builds these animatronics. And Bushnell told Brock that's just
a kid making junk in his garage. And then he
went and saw the wolf Pack five along with the
other thing that he created, the Hard Luck Bears, which
were indeed a rip off of the Country Bear Jam Bream,
and saw that they operated more smoothly, had a wider

(44:25):
range of motion than the existing stuff at the Pizza
Time Theater chain, and so he decided, I'm going into
business with this kid. And at the crux of this
deal was the Rocket Fire Explosion Band, which is, if
you are of roughly of our demographic age, the band
that you saw at Chucky Cheeses. And that man was

(44:46):
a combination of the wolf Pack five and the Hard
Luck Bears, featuring the characters Rolf and Earl Duke, LaRue,
keyboard playing gorilla named Fats Geronimo, Beach Bear, Mitzi, Mozzarella,
Billy Bob Broccoli and the Loony Bird. So that's the combination.
So it's basically like guns and Roses with the two

(45:07):
bands sell a guns and Yes, okay very much so.
Aside from the fact that the Rockefeller presentation utilized three stages,
which gave them more flexibility and how they could stage
these shows, vectors animatronics work was pun intended head and
shoulders above what existed at the current Pizza Time theaters.

(45:28):
A Willington's Morning Star article about show biz broke down
the numbers behind the Rock of Fire Explosion from It
cost two million dollars to develop and it was sold
to franchise Ease for a hundred and twenty five grand.
The characters were built in groups of twenty five. It
took a week to build a group of twenty five,
took a week and a half to build a group

(45:49):
of twenty five over Orlando. Took twenty four hours to
program all of them to perform one song. Each character
had sixteen valves as part of its pneumatic system and
about a hundred and fifty gallons of compressed air necessary
to run it. Wow Factor himself also wrote all of
the songs for this, which took about three fifty hours

(46:11):
to record and produce the songs that they were playing,
which were all these like fifties and sixties do wop.
They also he did all the voices to not all
some of them, but he wrote these songs. Uh just
just really as jack of all trades, this guy and
they would do like beach Boys Medley's and like Beatles Medley's.
And at one point there was also one of them
doing a There was Michael Katson, who is an animatronic

(46:35):
large cat who did Michael Jackson songs. Oh that's good.
It was serious. You've been this whole episode? Oh yeah,
Michael cats, that's good. Ah with with dollar signs flash
up in your eyes with a share in the Showbiz
Pizza chain, Brock held the other factor. At long last,

(46:57):
had the financial and creative freedom to pursue his animal
animatronic singing Animal Animatronic streams, handed the financial management of
his company over to his dad to focus on programming, choreographing,
and voicing these characters. Michael Jackson visited the show Bizz
Company headquarters between tour stops on the Thriller tour. You
can see pictures of imposing with these things, and he

(47:19):
was supposedly, I have been unable to verify this. I
choose to believe it's true. Was supposedly moved to purchase
the Beatles catalogs. After seeing the Beatles Medley, the Showbiz
Pizza Factor told Fortune magazine that Brock is benefiting financially
from this deal. He's making money. But I'm going to
change the world if I can find it. I want

(47:43):
to punch in the show is pizza Beatles Medley right here.
I think you should well. I played you the I
played you, the one that made you so angry eat
a little pizza with some help from our friends, probably
rendered you speechless. I guess I gotta punch of that
is right here. As you meditate on that, We'll be

(48:13):
right back with more too much information. After these messages,
well predictively, Bushnell's Pizza Time and showbizz Pizza immediately took
him at each other in the market and expanded too fast,

(48:36):
too soon. A Showbiz Pizza super fan named Travis Shaefer
who runs what you describe as an incredible fan site
called showbiz Pizza dot Com. It's insane magazine. It has
all of these scans of these original newspaper articles. This
man is, he's like he's on our level. Well we
should have had him on damn it well, he told
Mail Magazine. Since Brock dropped out, they were hurrying to

(48:58):
add franchises all over. They only had a handful by
about six to ten restaurants, so suddenly expand like that
was a big undertaking. Original animatronic designer Harold Goldbrandson told
me that they wouldn't even consider a mom and pop
organization that only wanted to open one franchise. They only
wanted big money people who could open several stores. Do
you know the linear So the Beatles stand there was

(49:21):
called the Beagles because they were dogs. Only four of
them are known to um exist, uh fittingly, one is
in a museum, another is at a museum, is exactly,
one is at a gas station, and two others have
been retrofitted into, respectively, The Biscuits, a parody band of

(49:44):
iconic Glen Danzig starring punk band The Misfits, and then
Yes and then again retrofitted into rough, a dog animatronic
themed rush parody No No, and the last one is
owned by a collector and YouTuber. When the Beagles were
phased out. They were replaced by the Beach Bowsers, which

(50:07):
were a Beach Boys parody, Wow and Factor. The animatronics
design I later told Mel magazine, we had to beat
Chuck E Cheese to the best locations. So the executives
of Showbiz Pizza, We're growing so fast. Their heads were
spinning and spending money way too fast. They're out of
money before they even knew it. In by nine three,

(50:30):
they decided not to build any more restaurants, but it
was already too late. Bush, now obviously infuriated by Brock's betrayal,
sued Showbi's Pizza pretty much immediately, and uh Brock shot
back with the countersuit. This battle dragon on the courts
for years, but Showbiz settled in agreeing to pay percentage
of their profits to Chuck E Cheese for the next

(50:50):
fourteen years, something like millions of dollars over almost a
decade and a half. So next time you think you
he was big in a court. But there was an
even bigger problem for both musical animatronic pizza chains. The
free market became known as the video game crash Spectacular,

(51:13):
bottoming out for both the home video game market and arcades.
Home consoles like the Atari and personal computers dented the
appeal of the arcade wall. Once the novelty war off,
the limited experience of home video games ended up cratering
their profits. This was largely and ironically due to Tutari Games,
the glitchy buggy version of Pac Man for the home market,

(51:35):
and its rushed adaptation of et the extraterrestrial legend in
video game circles. It's failed so spectacularly that Atari was
famously forced to bury the extra copies in a landfield
in New Mexico. As a whole documentary about it on Netflix,
It's Great All told in Night three. The arcade industry's

(51:56):
profits dropped between September and December. It's the Time lost
over seventy five million dollars and over twelve dollars per share,
and Bushnell resigned as CEO and the company filed for
bankruptcy in Goodbye Sweet Rats, Yes do not get gentle

(52:17):
into that good bulpit. Fascinatingly, one of the ways in
which Push Now lost money was experimenting with a company
called Cadabroscope, which sought to reinvent traditional animation by using
a computer to fill in hand drawn frames of animation
with computer generated frames. Uh In three he bought a

(52:39):
one and a half million dollar computer to aid him
in this quest, and hired a team headed by a
renound ex Disney animator named Jack Nichols. The fruits of
these labors were to be special called The Christmas That
Almost Wasn't starring Charles and the Rest of His Gang,
which was supposed to be aired on NBC. It was
never aired, but does exist online. And here's the crazy part.

(53:01):
Bushnell sold Cadabroscope, which he had hoped to launch an
animated Charles media empire. He sold that company to Lucasfilm,
who would develop that technology into Pixar. So you got
your Atari, you got your Chuck e Cheese, you got
your Pisar. This guy, there are promotional photos from the

(53:21):
time of bush now standing next to this bank of
computers with Bob Pauli, who's the Pixar guy who designed
buzz Lightyear. He was like the Forrest Gump of Bay
Area tech stuff. He also employed Steve Jobs at one
point and sadly missed out on the opportunity to get
on the ground floor of Apple. What is this guy's
net worth? Only fifty mill Well, he fumbled a lot

(53:43):
of bags. Showbiz Pizza had to do whatever we could
to say afloat, So we had to bring in money, people, vultures,
and they wanted to control Showbiz Pizza, control me, and
control Bob Brock. So I began using my percentage to
veto bad idea after bad idea, of fact, are told
Mail Magazine, then they will never control Showbiz Pizza. Yea.

(54:06):
Then they had the worst idea of all to merge
with Chuck E Cheese. We were fighting Chucky Cheese for
five years, and we knew we were better than Chuck
E Cheese. They were crapped and we were great. That's
what we believed. We were rivals. We don't want to
buy them out. We want to kill them. If they're
going to go out of business, let them go out
of business, don't prop them up. Kill the rat. Let
me plunge the sword through Chucky Cheese his heart. I

(54:29):
love Aaron Factor. Perhaps because of this stance of his, though,
the relationship between he and Showbiz sour to the point
where they were only communicating through lawyers. Showbiz one of
the rights to the Rocket Fire Explosion characters, but fector
refused to sell, believing that his characters were on the
verge of making lucrative deals via film and television record
deals narrator voice. They were not, so he pulled out

(54:53):
and the companies and and actually Chowbiz made a smart
move because they were able to restructure all of their
debt and this court settlement by buying Chuck E Cheese.
And then they embarked on something called concept reunification. Sounds
of the German Mountain. I was gonna say it sounds
like the great leap forward concept unification where they skinned

(55:17):
all of the old characters they didn't have the rights
to anymore and dances something Chairman mount at a time
and put new fur and clothes on them. And you
can see all of these training videos on YouTube where
they they're like, first removed Geronimo Guerilla's face, then his clothes.
It's it's truly incredible. Well, by two thousand five, Chucky

(55:39):
Cheese had grown to five hundred locations and its design
had morphed from an adult with a tuxedo and scarred
game to eighteen with a baseball cap, which is how
I knew him, and even more towards Moustum when bowling
for Soups, Jarrett Reddick became the character's new voice. I
did not know that. In twenty fourteen, Apollo Global Management

(56:02):
bought the chain's parent company for one point three billion dollars,
while in June, the chain filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy
protection after it was battered both by competition from other
quote active play companies like trampoline Parks, Laser Tag Facilities,
and David Busters, as well as pandemic related store closures.

(56:22):
But a little over six months later, according to the
nation's restaurant news c e C. Chuck E Cheese Entertainment
announced that it had pulled itself out of bankruptcy. The
rap Rap truly is a survivor. It's really great that
was the that was the animal for it pull itself
out of bankruptcy, newly financially healthy and afloat after a restructure,
did away with seven hundred five million dollars in debt. Wow.

(56:46):
But when where the rat lost the financial war, he
won the hearts and minds of the world. For example,
Dave Ferguson, a showbiz pizza enthusiasts who grew up to
be a defense Contractor teamed up with Chris Thrash, a
roller rink DJ and Alabama. Sounds like a romantic comedy.
He's a defense contractor, she's a roller rink DJ and Alabama. Together,

(57:11):
they're just saving animatonic rap together. They're rinking around. I
don't know that's there's no bad ideas in bransforming um.
The two of them purchased a number of decommissioned Rockefire
animatronics and using software that Ferguson developed to program all
of them, began uploading videos to YouTube of these zombie

(57:32):
Rockefire bands performing contemporary songs, among them Bubba Sparks Is
Miss New Booty and I Think Usher's Love in the Club.
Amassing thousands of hits, viral hits. Um and this increased
visibility actually had material rewards for Factor. Thrash opened his
own restaurant in Alabama with all of these characters that

(57:54):
he bought. Celo Green booked the Rockefier explosion to back
him in a Vegas performance. Ryan Gosling put them in
his directorial debut, Lost River, but Fector was horrified. She
told Popular Mechanics inten I hated it. That was my
first reaction absolutely hated it. Those were adult songs. That's
not the rock a Fire audience. He sued Ferguson, saying,

(58:17):
David's my whack a mole. If he pops up again,
I'm going to bring that hammer down. The trash talk
between these guys, it's really great. Well funnily enough, Chucky
Cheese had an actual corporate policy in place of discourage
an aftermarket industry. Employees were told to either destroy old costumes,
as seen in two thousand and seventeen them in a

(58:37):
video surface of some employees that recently shutted Illinois locations
smashing a costume head with a sledge hammer, or to
break them down into their constituent parts and ship them
back to a hub for repurposing. I believe his actual
verbiage that he used was even if the head has
past its useful life, our practice is to take all
of the parts off the head, so we salvaged the

(58:59):
nose and ears and some of the other parts, much
like Jeffrey Dahmer um ed geen, I don't know punch
of better serial killer reference into that. Meanwhile, in the
animatronic Pizza animal industry was dealt another blow by Five
Nights at Freddie's, a massively popular horror survival video game
series in which players attempted to live through the overnight

(59:19):
shift at a Chucky Cheese esque children's pizza parlor, battling
off evil animatronic characters. While online chatter said that the
game was supposedly inspired by a real life shooting at
an Aurora, Colorado Chucky Cheeses, the creator said it was
actually just the poor reaction to his previous game that
inspired it. They said his lead character looked like a

(59:41):
nightmare animatronic character, so he said, I'll show you um Aurora, Colorado,
of course, being famous less than ten years later for
another mass shooting. There's also a low budget Nicolas Cage
horror movie called Willie's Wonderland that came out in which
features Cage battling in a array of demonically possessed children's animatronics,
and they set up surprisingly similar to Five Nights at Freddy's,

(01:00:05):
and Factor capitalized on Five Nights at Freddie's by hosting
themed birthday parties at the near abandoned Creative Engineering Headquarters
in Florida, where the rock a fire explosion performs before
shutting off the lights to emulate the haunted after hours
feel of the game that sounds horrified. I'm gonna send
to a non refundable one way ticket to that and

(01:00:27):
make them do the all the Beatles songs. Can you
imagine You're in a dark, abandoned warehouse in Orlando and
a bunch of animatronic dogs are singing Beatles songs at you. Oh,
I want that for you, I want I want your fear.
You know. Honestly, they don't really need to fictionalize the violence.
Uh just google Chuck E Cheese Fight or Chuck E

(01:00:50):
Cheese Violence for an alarming lengthy list of brawls and
shootings at the restaurant. The chain has served alcohol at
some of its locations for a long time, But I
don't think you can really chalk all of it up
to it. Uh, just all of that people have speculated this,
the fact that it's a bunch of kids having kind

(01:01:10):
of co mingled largely unsupervised birthday parties, and then a
bunch of parents drinking and getting territorial in a very
high stimulus environment. Um One Chucky Cheeses in Brookfield, Wisconsin
triggered more calls to the police in two thousand eight
than any other restaurant in the city, including a biker

(01:01:31):
bar down the street, which is just the news story
I love the most these days. Nolan Bushnell is based
in l A, working in a bunch of video game
and tex sphere adjacent kind of stuff. Um Aside from
the recent fiftieth anniversary of Pong, the last time he
was in the news was for releasing an n f
T which was bought by Brock Pierce, the Mighty Ducks

(01:01:54):
actor turned crypto evangelist. Factor has continued to invent, including
an experimental cooking fuel called carbo hydrillium, which caused an
explosion at a creative engineering warehouse in Orlando that scattered
old rocket fire animatronic parts everywhere, which was a horrifying scene.

(01:02:14):
Thankfully there were no human injuries, but police and fire
talked about showing up and seeing all of these old
animatronic animal heads scattered everywhere. Chuck E. Cheese sadly began
phasing out its animatronics in two thousand seventeen, to the
consternation of nineties kids everywhere, but Bushnell was sanguine about it.
He told Gizmoto animatronics were cutting it. When Chucky Cheese started.

(01:02:37):
I try very hard not to live my life in
the review beer. I like change, I like progress, and
I like new things, and I like pizza and I
like rats. Sorry, what were we talking about? Yeah? What
he just stared off into. It's like those those click
hold quotes. I like rats, Nolan Bushnell, unprompted, one of

(01:03:00):
the voices of Chucky Cheese, Duncan Brandon told Mel Magazine
Olan Bushnell, those guys back then, it was just genius,
pure genius. It was so cool because we had watched
cartoons for years. But to be able to go somewhere,
sit down and have a meal and a game room
over there, that already was cool, but then you could
go over here and watch these robots to a show.

(01:03:20):
It was outrageous and it's created such a magical experience
for so many families. I have nothing else to add
to that. Uh. May all of you have both the
joy and the tear that only a giant pizza rat
can impart in life. You can't have the pizza without

(01:03:41):
the rat. That's the kicker. Folks. Thank you for taking
this journey down memory lane with Jordan Charles and I
I have Alex Tagel. This has been too Much Information.
Thank you for listening, and I'm Jordan run Tog. We'll
catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production

(01:04:04):
of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel
Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The show's supervising producer is Michael
Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by
Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by
Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like
what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.
For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit the I heart

(01:04:24):
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows