Chuck E. Cheese's 1982 Annual Report For Kids [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Chuck E. Cheese's 1982 Annual Report For Kids [pdf]

showbizpizza.com

203 pointsstriking73 comments

Quickly skimming it, I found no evidence of what the future actually held, from Wikipedia [1]:

> In 1981, Pizza Time Theatre went public; they lost $15 million in 1983. By early 1984, Bushnell's debts were insurmountable, resulting in the filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy for Pizza Time Theatre Inc. on March 28, 1984.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_E._Cheese

I rather like that in Australia they couldn’t call it Chuck E. Cheese because that meant vomiting.

I guess that explains why their sports arena “The Chunderdome” didn’t take off either.

My name is Charles. I moved to the USA and everyone tries to call me "Chuck", which to my British psyche is horrible for the same linguistic reason.

Look on the bright side: At least your name isn't 'Richard'.

Hey man, don't be a Dick.

I am currently wearing a "don't be a Richard" shirt which is one of my home improvement shirts. 2 different checkout folks at 2 different hardware stores were calling over coworkers because they both apparently had managers off today named Richard who were in fact "Richards".

Lol now I’m curious what is your other home improvement shirt. I could use an official way to convey to people that I may look like I’m just puttering around but I am actually on a diy mission.

oh by diy shirts I mean all the shirts that I have oil stains on or paint... that I wear when I just don't give a f or hwne I know I'm going to get more dirty. I have one that is an old mozzila appu shirt... with a sweet gtradient on it. The gradient came from me usinga circular slot cutter on a mill that tossed metal and oil at my midline and taperd off as it fell.

As an aside, people often misattribute where that word comes from. It's from dicker - squandering time by squabbling over petty things

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dicker

It's certainly not polite but people claiming it's lewd have about as much ground to stand on as they do with the word "pussycat"

pusy and dick are common terms for lewd things. pussycat and dicker are not.

Past etymology isn't really relevant to how a word is actually used today. There are plenty of awful slurs that were once everyday words used offensively.

This definitely applies if your last name is "Armey". But some people just run with it!

Being called Randolph would be worse.

The doubling of restaurants in 1982 is a pretty good indicator that it was going to explode. That kind of growth is often unsustainable.

Yeah instant 2x headcount growth is a pretty blaring warning. Good thing we learned the lesson well in the 80s and haven't repeated it since.

And these lessons are incorporated into business programs world wide and taught to each new generation so that they may permeate the business landscape and prevent unnecessary hardships.

This is why I advocate advanced degrees in business for folks looking to enter leadership positions.

Was this comment satire?

It is dripping with it.

2x headcount growth without additional information isn't a warning on its own.

If I am a solo founder and hire my first employee, that's 2x headcount growth.

Between 1970 and 1971, Walmart went from 38 to 51 stores, 1500 to 2300 employees [1].

Not quite 2x, but still, not exactly a "blaring warning" or "red flag" in hindsight.

https://one.walmart.com/content/walmartmuseum/en_us/timeline...

Times of great change (that growth) are risky. Even if it is not a blaring warning in the sense that failure is then unavoidable...

OK, but… that’s a store selling anything and everything under the sun tapping into a previous untouched market. This is an animatronic rat for kids. Context is key.

The arcade family restaurant concept was also a previously untouched market.

I guess Mickey Mouse is just an animatronic rat too!

Pretty sure McDonald's and many other chains have seen that kind of growth at one point or another. Going from 20 to 40 or 100 to 200, in a year is not necessarily an indication of a problem.

It is a sign of increasing risk. It’s a virtual certainty that that growth is financed by a LOT of new debt.

To their credit, Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese also pulled in more revenue per store than many other competing restaurants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbI3zOm2BkE

Skip ahead to 7:20

They pulled in more revenue than the average McDonald's and 3x more than Pizza Hut.

It does seem like the concept has always struggled to be cost-efficient but I don't know that rapid growth was a bad indicator on its own.

It's also probably worth keeping in mind that some of those restaurants may have been franchised. When a franchisor sells a franchise license to a local franchisee, the local franchisee bears most of the risk.

Rapid expansion seemed to serve the owners goals (from Nolan Bushnell’s Wikipedia page. He also started Atari.)

> It had been created by Bushnell, originally as a place where kids could go and eat pizza and play video games, which would therefore function as a distribution channel for Atari games.

Little known fact, the idea came to Bushnell when he was still running Atari. He was waiting for pizza and realized these bored people would pay to pay games while waiting. [1]

Bushnell was frustrated that Atari only got money on the original sale of a coin-op machine, while the operators got continuous revenue from the machine. He figured Atari could get in on the operations game by running a restaurant.

Atari built/ran the first Chuck E Cheese and Atari engineers (and Atari think tank Cyan Engineering) designed the robots. Restaurant opening party was private for Atari staff.

The mascot was originally going to be called Rick Rat, until marketing suggested that associating a rat with the restaurant wasn't the best idea.

When Warner Communications bought out Atari, they didn't understand it or want it, so Bushnell bought it out from them and continued running it.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40425172/robots-pizza-and-magic-...

Rick Rat is the most programmer idea for a mascot ever

We will call it "no bugs games and pizza!"

As someone from Missouri it was very jarring that the map of all their restaurants is shown on a US map, except for some reason the states of Iowa and Missouri are conjoined.

I wonder if this was just a mistake? Or perhaps Mr. Cheese was well known for his radical Missouri-Iowa annexation stance in the early 80s?

It was probably a mistake, but I like the idea of a radical Cheese-driven state annexation; I'm sure that Wisconsin was somehow involved.

Wait, has it not always been Missouriowa?

Ever since I was a baby zorg. Did something happen to the timeline again?

https://youtu.be/ZoWc6WRHKEE

Looks like someone just saw the latest Brightsun Films video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbI3zOm2BkE

Chuck E. Cheese's, Silicon Valley Startup: The Origins of the Best Pizza Chain Ever - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/chuck...

> You may not know this, but Chuck E. Cheese's -- yes, the pizza place -- has its origins as firmly planted in the soil of Silicon Valley as Apple, HP, or Intel. In fact, it sprang from Nolan Bushnell's Atari like Athena to the videogame company's Zeus.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40425172/robots-pizza-and-magic-...

Growing up during the arcade/video game boom, Showbiz/Chuck E Cheese was an amazing place (ours converted over some point I'm not sure if they all did or what)

It's kind of weird how in the last ten or so years it devolved into a place more famous for fights and shootings between drunken parents, than pizza and video games.

The history behind ShowBiz is pretty interesting. A prospective licensed of Pizzatime Theatre (the company behind Chuck E Cheese) bailed on the license agreement, formed a ShowBiz, and eventually merged with Pizzatime.

Details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShowBiz_Pizza_Place

I also recommend “The Rock-afire Explosion”, a 2008 documentary about the rise and fall of Showbiz Pizza and the fate of The Rock-afire Explosion, ShowBiz Pizza’s animatronic band.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1327599/

Alcohol has better margins than pizza so they probably did not want to remove it from the menu despite the obvious problems it causes.

It's also not just alcohol; it's probably also how their primary business involves gatherings of extended families. It's a place you go almost exclusively to have a party like that, so it's like how you know there will be an argument with your uncle about politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table.

I have many fond memories of birthday parties/outings at Showbiz. I was mostly aging out of it by the time it converted to CeC in the early 90s.

As a young (and current) nerd, I always liked the animatronics, and how can you top pizza, free refills on drinks, ball pits, ticket-reward-prizes, and arcade games as a kid. My children are almost at the age where they would love something like that also; it's too bad they're gone.

I haven't found anything that seems to fit the same space for kids. Sure, there are bouncy house places or sports places, but those always feel a little too rushed. You get your block of time, and you are shoved out the door when the clock hits your hour so they can cycle through the next group. SB/CeC didn't work like that: you could keep playing until your parents didn't want to give you any more tokens. Parents would hang back at the table and nibble on (crappy) pizza and a beer while the kids ran around and played. I think it was just part of that 80s parenting style, where you didn't feel like it was necessary to micromanage your kids' activities.

I took my now six year old to a Chuck E. Cheese on his second birthday. He liked it, but it wasn’t fun enough to go go back. Maybe when he’s older we will do an arcade birthday party (lots of arcade style places that do parties these days).

Duck Hunt is the gateway to confronting Uncle Joe about his views on welfare programs.

Chuck E. Cheese's chairman was Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and creator of Pong. Woz and Jobs used to work for him and offered him a third of Apple for $50k in the 1970s.

"I was so smart, I said no. It's kind of fun to think about that, when I'm not crying." -Nolan Bushnell

Their business model was brilliant, we used to say it was a casino for children.

I got my first bike at a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese in San Jose on a Sunday in March 1983. (The location still exists.) The animatronic puppets were large, loud, gracelessly mechanical, and creepy to little kids. That aside, it was difficult to argue with ever sort of arcade game, skeeball, whackamole, and basketball game that spat out the all-important tickets to win carnival prizes.

Full name is Charles Entertainment Cheese

Hello, brother.

Entertainment is his middle name.

He won a Pong tournament and that’s his origin story

One of my earliest memories is of Showbiz Pizza (when the name was changed a few years later after the merger, we continued to call it Showbiz because none of us knew it was the knock-off) and I had a Billy Bob doll (one of the ones here I’m assuming from the 1984-1990 era unless mine actually came from an older cousin or my sister who is 8 years older than me https://www.showbizpizza.com/sppcollect/dolls/dolls_billy.ht...) that I kept in my room alongside some tokens that I stored in my jewelry box (because if you are two years old, you keep your tokens in a jewelry box).

I was born after the “collapse” of the Chuck E. Cheese business and the late 70s/early 80s home video game era as a whole (but just in time for the NES to take over the world and reignite the industry), so I don’t have the same memories of these as places to play video games (I don’t think I ever really interacted with an arcade cabinet until Mortal Kombat in 1992 or 1993, and even that was almost certainly after the home versions were out out) because we had a Nintendo and that was video games to me, but I remember it for skee-ball and the animatronic shows. I loved the shows. Watching the history of this stuff and the stuff on Showbiz on Last Week Tonight and other channels is wild to me that this was something that actually existed in our world in the last 35 years.

After our Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese closed (another one still existed but it was further away), the big thing was “Discovery Zone” - which tried to do the same thing except it had lots of indoor playground equipment. But I always just strapped into the shooting or basketball games that would reward those with good hand-eye coordination with tickets and stuff. And I went to my first Dave & Busters in third grade and then I discovered what a Chuck E. Cheese for adults looked like and that my friends, THAT was the dream for many many years.

Cannot see CEC/SBP without linking John Oliver's excellent segment.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lj1ixNIf1dA "Last Squeak Tonight Presents: A History of Chuck E. Cheese"

Minor spoiler: Chuck E. Cheese and his friends are pedophiles.

Or as John Oliver puts it,

>> "When we started writing something about Chuck E. Cheese for you, we were thinking 'This will be 5, 6 minutes, tops.' But the more we looked into it, the more fascinated we got, and this officially got out of hand. So, I'm going to be talking about Chuck E. Cheese for... and I'm not kidding about this... the next 25 minutes."

Technically, it was the "alternate" segment to an episode on HOAs and posted at lastsqueaktonight.com, which seems to be empty now. But in my head, it was the original segment and didn't get approved.

I went to Chuck E. Cheese as a young kid, but I vastly preferred Leaps and Bounds [1].

Leaps and Bounds had gigantic playgrounds. Tunnels, slides, gigantic net treehouses and overhangs. They were gargantuan. You could take nerf guns and have hours of physical exercise and fun with your friends.

Chuck E. Cheese had arcades, which were outclassed by at-home video games. I never understood the appeal. I'd rather have played Super Mario RPG or Mario 64. Leaps and Bounds locations even had a modest arcade.

When Chuck E Cheese took them over, they ripped out the physical playgrounds and replaced it all with arcades. Major downgrade.

I'd much rather go to an 80's themed neon and blacklight arcade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaps_and_Bounds_(playplace)

You’re probably just a little too young. By the time Mario 64 and RPG came out in the mid 90s, Chuck E. Cheese was a shadow of it’s former glory.

Mid 80s Chuck e Cheese was peak birthday fun. I would be totally spent by the time we made it to the ticket counter.

Looked like a great idea to teach children about business

The Federal Reserve used to publish a whole slew of comics and books about money, banking, and the economy. The best part was that they were free - including shipping.

I didn't realize the guy that founded Chuck E Cheese was also the creator of Pong.

And Atari!

Just to set the record straight, by all accounts, Ralph Baer was the inventor of pong, and Nolan Bushnell later copied it.

https://youtu.be/1LsRGUODHlQ

Chuck won a Pong tournament and spent the winnings on a bus ticket to NYC

Does anyone know what the name of that purple character with the yellow hair and patch on its belly is? one of the puppets in that unfunny hack jeff dunham's collection looks like a direct ripoff of that character

Mr. Munch.

The artwork in here is _incredible_.

I agree, it's a refreshing change from Corporate Memphis which would probably be what'd appear if this were from within the past few years.

Look at that graphic! The mouse, as Pied Piper, leading those kids (whose eyes roll back as they proceed, trancelike) away from the safety of their castle — their home. The kid closest to Chuck is so far gone that he has become part animal himself. But to Chuck, this is merely business, as indicated by his briefcase and dead eyes. He is only there to collect the parents' money, and the children's souls.

Chuck E. Chichikov.

The They Create Worlds podcast (video game history) did a nice episode on the history of Chuck E Cheese a few years back: http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/the-story-of-chuck-e-c...

This is awesome. Was there a separate report for adults?

Yes. They were a public company at the time.

on page 13, Money Going Out, bottom right corner

there's a cartoon of Chuck E Cheese looking like he's behind bars? right under the banner saying Taxes

was the illustrator trying to tell the kids something

A more innocent and optimistic time for sure.

I like your sentiment but I don’t think it’s true. We were in the thick of the Cold War. The movie “Threads” - discussed here a few days ago - would be released two years later. The Falklands and other wars started.

Honestly, the world was a bit of a mess in 1982.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com