Chuck E. Cheese's

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Captain Vegetable
I've only ever been to a Chuck E. Cheese's once, and that was 8 months ago for my baby brother-in-law's birthday.

Every time I asked my parents to take me, they said "NO!" :(

---

well you're old enough to go where you want, but you're too old to be there... :(

I didn't have a lot of places to go in my area, so it wasn't a big deal. The closest thing I had was a partial pizza-bar hangout with a few arcades which ended up switching owners (and chucking the machines out the window) for a few years before it changed back. Plus 2 other places that opened awhile but vanished as well. In the town that was further out, I know of this guy who was trying to get a place he could keep running his stuff in, but we had a town gov that was a MAJOR prick (I still want to beat his head in) and was doing plenty of things to dictate where he could set up. Mainly he was stiffed with a high building payment and was told he brought trouble in the area with the kids and small gangs (which was total BS btw). I guess he just got mad and decided to quit becuase it was more trouble then it was worth. oh well...

but he did have this kick-ass spawn painting on the wall (he made it himself, todd would be proud! :D )

I'm pretty sure Chuck E. Cheese's was where I played my first arcade game, at about six or seven years old. Vs. Castlevania is the earliest one I remember.

My Chucky Cheese used to be called Showbiz. And wow, fond memories indeed I had of it. The most memorable would either be Dragon's Lair, getting dared to sneak under the curtain into the robot's area (believe me, it was a really scary concept at the time), playing in the balls (hahaha, and funny enough they always smelled like piss, wonder why...), Simpson's arcade game, the pizza (which I actually love), and....


COTTON CANDY! I still, to this day, go there for the cotton candy. Well...and to see the scary robots.

There was a fantastic Chuck E. Cheese in central Phoenix around 1983 or so that put every other modern CEC and Showbiz to shame. The place was huge, or at least it seemed that way to me when I was a kid. There was a big gazebo in the center of the building filled with classic arcade games like Centipede, Millipede, Pac-Man, Naughty Boy, Moon Patrol, Donkey Kong 3...and many more (those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head). To the left was a room full of redemption machines plus some mini-cabinets, you know those special ones they made for toddlers? Beyond the gazebo room was a room filled with the latest laserdisc games like M.A.C.H. 3, Firefox, Cobra Command and Cliff Hanger (actually a hacked-up "interactive" Lupin cartoon).

To the right was a giant mound of Swiss cheese that you could crawl through. And beyond it was the auditorium, a grand affair with a real stage and a big red curtain that parted to reveal the Rock-a-Fire Band. It was lame, but still cool to watch while downing a pizza slice or two.

And then there was the piece de resistance: a giant driving game with an enormous projection screen. The steering wheel controlled a car attached to a cylinder just in front of the projector that would make the car appear large when projected against the screen. It was a really poor game but still very impressive looking, if only for a few minutes.

Good times.

I enjoyed ball pits. As a kid, my dream was to have an extra-deep one built into my basement. I often wondered if it would be possible to drown in such a massive pile of balls. <-- (out of context quote bait)

However, by far my best and strangest memory of the local Chuck E. Cheese involved a playhouse called the Cheese Factory. It looked like a miniature house built into a wall, and behind the glass windows you could see wedges of "cheese" whisking by on conveyor belts. The front door was kid-sized, and I have so many weird, conflicting memories of its bizarre interior. I remember...

- the front room being bright yellow, and having funhouse-like mirrors. there was a mousehole in the corner you could crawl into, and something of interest was presumably in there. another mirror?

- you proceed by jumping into a round hole in the far corner that has round, carpeted steps downward. i seem to remember finding an underground-feeling room with a bunch of kids watching a tv in the corner. surreal.

- it gets blurrier after this. i think you might climb more round step things to get out of the tv room, and this might be near the end of the cheese factory experience. you crawl thorugh some tight tunnels and finally find a slide that takes you back out to the front, to your waiting parent(s).

- i have a semi-traumatic memory of being in that upper level tunnel part and then trying to go back through a door i'd passed through. however, it was one-way, and the only way out was down the slide. and... there's something about my mom having to rescue me from there. or maybe she just coaxed me down the slide.

Dream, reality... Who knows? Whatever happened, and whatever actually existed, I will never forget the Cheese Factory.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by sleeveboy
Cliff Hanger (actually a hacked-up "interactive" Lupin cartoon).

---

Awful stuff, though my friend does have a cabinet of this. I never got very far in it but I remember the "JUMP! woooop JUMP! woooop JUMP!" and the "Billions! Trillions! They're all counterfeit!"

It's also in The Goonies for a split-second.

Heh, there was a Lupin III game at CGE that must have been the same. As far as FMV games go it was pretty unplayable. Talk about unintuitive.

It's a shame that Chuck E. Cheese lately has been a joke. Now they've got very few games... when I saw maybe 4-6 video games and too many redemption games to count, I was mortified. "What have they done to this place!?!?" was the first thing to cross my mind.

They do own a place called TJ Hartford's www.tjhartfords.com , but there is only one location... and it is in Texas. It sounds like a Dave & Buster's type place except with quarters (none of that expensive debit card crap).

By the way, www.showbizpizza.com now is a very good fan site dedicated to Showbiz & Chuck E. Cheese. From here, I found a link to a site which had info on the token formerly used by TJ Hartfords... and learned about the existence of TJH in the first place. I'm hoping CEC opens a TJH around my town sometime.

http://users.pullman.com/fjstevens/tokens/cec/CEC.html
Scroll all the way to the bottom and check out the TJ Hartford's token link.

I remember hating Chuck E. Cheese's when I was a kid. The food sucked, the other kids were annoying, I was too big to go in the ball pit or climb through the funhouse, and all the games at the one near me were lame.

There was a rollerskating place down the street, however, that kicked ass. Decent food, fun games (The Simpsons being my favorite0, and watching the huge pileups of people who couldn't skate made it the cool place to be. It also helped that I was hell on wheels (on the skates, that is).

I like their pizza.

But it's expensive.