Farewell, Chuck E. Cheese Animatronic Band | Hacker News Reader

Farewell, Chuck E. Cheese Animatronic Band

nytimes.com

45 pointssamclemens46 comments

Next, more screens. Unimaginative.

The Aura robots at The Sphere in Las Vegas are the current technology.[1] They have full voice recognition, speech generation, and ChatGPT-type models good enough that they can do standup comedy and deal with people heckling them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LphOgO5HJHs

Its funny it has a human baby-sitter.

For Las Vegas I'm surprised they managed to restrain themselves from making it more chesty.

> Its funny it has a human baby-sitter.

For now.

A few years from now, there will probably just be a display in a security or maintenance control room to report when one of the Aura bots needs some help. And some of those bots will probably be running table games.

Human table dealers streaming online and robotic table dealers at casino tables. Yay future.

That's the best interaction I've seen - so many are just GPT piped into a TTS, but this seems to actually be identifying different speakers in the crowd? There's a point where a guy butts in to ask a question and the robot basically says "wait a sec, I'm talking to this person, are you done? Okay, now I'll answer your question, raise your hand." That's another layer of interaction that's impressive and the latency and speech recognition quality is near-realtime. Very cool

Exactly. Their brand is tightly interwoven with the animatronic band, but they haven't been evolving that. With generative AI and improved robotics they could create much more immersive experiences.

They are damaging their brand. Kids have lots of screens at home.

Honestly most kids have better video game rigs at home. Maybe the games with driving rigs, flying yokes, or handheld guns are harder to replicate, but kids get plenty of gaming at home. It’s not the outing it once was.

That laugh is psychopathic though.

Pay no attention to that woman behind the curtain.

I'm surprised that Five Nights at Freddy’s was referred to as just a horror movie - the 2014 game it's based on was a smash hit that spurred many copycats and transformed the survival-horror genre.

Anyway as an outsider I've never seen these things portrayed in movies, cartoons etc. as anything else but creepy. Personally I regarded them as a show of American economic might - I mean:

1. Robots.

2. For entertainment in a family-oriented restaurant.

3. In the 80s.

I’m not sure I’ve ever fully understood Five Nights games. I just thought it’s something kids like for no good reason, like Hello Neighbour, which feels like an incomplete Garry’s Mod level.

They're good streamer games. The fun is in the reactions of the people playing them, not as much in the actual gameplay.

Sounds like you do fully understand them, because you've nailed it with your description

I had a birthday there in my mid-20s and probably blew $400 or so at the place just giving piles of tokens to my friends to play in the lousy arcade at the Fairfield location (yes, the Fairfield between SF and Sacramento). Someone arranged for the robots to sing me a song. I'm pretty sure that's my most memorable adult birthday. I find absurdity deeply entertaining.

This sounds amazing. Kind of sad I never thought of this before.

They have a beer selection. It's a good afternoon.

I remember playing on a vintage street fighter machine with what was probably a middle school kid. I lost pretty bad.

> Out: Animatronic bands.

> In: More screens, digital dance floors and trampoline gyms.

Sounds very appropriate for the era. Everything that has any ounce of character is replaced with their cheaper, more generic digital reincarnations.

I have an 8-year-old and a toddler and have hosted and attended many a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese and elsewhere. A digital dance floor and trampoline are way better at a birthday party than an animatronic band. Kids love both and each gets them moving and wears them out. An animatronic band wouldn’t even hold their attention for a minute.

I have children myself. If I want them to dance I can also just turn on the TV or their tablet. This is just a minor upgrade over that.

> Like many young children, Kendall was initially slightly scared of Chuck E.

It's probably no surprise that an alternative that brings immediate pleasure / curiosity ultimately won out.

It’s the end of an era, along with the old floppy disk based control system Chuck E. Cheese restaurants used. Every time I saw the older (pre-remodel) location I used to occasionally visit in SoCal… It was like jumping into a time warp back to the 80s and 90s for me. Nolan Bushnell has effectively outlived his creation.

R.I.P.

Godspeed, Charles Entertainment Cheese. We will meet again in Valhalla.

Lo, there do I see my father...

Related throwback:

Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks in 2023, but not for long

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/chuck...

(On that floppy disk tip from other article around this week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40327307)

https://archive.ph/56jqv

How can we have a thread on Chuck E Cheese with out Oliver’s history?

https://youtu.be/3v6y2pY1pZ0?si=sU3OrRSmR0gXDNPT

Chuck E. Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame, just 5 years after he created Pong. I didn't expect this connection at all when I first learned about it.

Half of their games didn't amount to much more than child gambling. I guess the saving grace is that people weren't there very often. Still I'd be curious to know if there is any sort of research as to whether childhood gambling transfers to adulthood.

Haven't been to Chuck E Cheese's in a while, but I wonder if they've toned some of that down since moving from tokens to (optionally "all you can play" time-based) cards.

Back in my day, the slot machines and coin pusher games served as a lesson against gambling, since they ate all your tokens really quickly and you almost never won anything significant.

I haven’t been to a Chuck E Cheese in at least 15 years BUT I have been to other “arcades”, including Main Event, and the trend for those has been make 90% of the games child gambling to maximize profit. It’s boring for my young children who don’t fully grasp the ticket concept and aren’t entertained by winning points. I remember the games of my childhood being much more about entertainment than they are now.

A better metaphor than gambling is carnival games, the prize return on investment in arcade gaming is systemically low. I've worked at several game companies and never known a single gamer in my life who's been interested in gambling.

The sports community is obviously what's being taken over by gambling. Sports are being so thoroughly defined by and ruined by it that it's weird to think of gambling as a big deal in other contexts. If you try to apply the gambling moral panic to video games it doesn't work because sports so conspicuously shows what it looks like when the slippery slope is real and not just hypothetical.

Trying to see the effects of gambling anywhere but with sports right now is like trying to see the stars when the sun is out.

This seems like a huge mistake.

The robots are the whole reason you go to Chuck E. Cheese over say Dave & Busters or Bowlero.

It's the entire differentiator.

to be honest I don't know why showbiz bought Chuck e cheese and didn't keep showbiz Rockabilly explosion was way more appealing IMHO

Wow that brought back some memories! I knew I had gone to a pizza place with an animatronic band, and it definitely wasn’t Chuck E Cheese. I’ve never been able to figure out what it was.

Yup, it was Showbiz and the Rock-afire Explosion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock-afire_Explosion

Thank you!

They could have doubled down and invested in some newer animatronics, with voice recognition and more realistic movements, reactions, mobility, etc., to differentiate themselves from other pizza/video games chains. But instead they chose easy, with "big displays." How unimaginative.

the old animatronics were already expensive as is. That's the quirk of being a market targeing children. Children don't necessarily scale as quality increases.

The Bright Sun Films mini doc on chuck e. cheese is so good, highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbI3zOm2BkE (all the bright sun videos are A+ fwiw)

If only they had struck a deal with Scott Cawthorn.

FNAF was the final nail in the coffin. For some reason, they did not like that animatronics are now associated with child-murdering terror machines.

If by FNAF you mean the game franchise Five Nights at Freddy's, that could only have boosted their popularity. You get the fans of that game who would at the very least go there to see the real deal (minus the killing) as an additional untapped set of customers. The core demographic (parents with young children) won't care about that game one way or another, and if they do have a child into that game's fandom it will only make them more willing to cajole their parents into going.

The causes for their demise are completely based on the economics of maintaining actual animatronic characters.

By licensing FNAF I feel like they could have gotten hordes of teens in

I'm 44 of they match a FNAF horror themed dave and busters I'm gonna be all over that... I'm not really a FNAF .. per se... or player but the movie was okay..I liked the Nicholas Cage one similar to it better...

but I like creepy things...

Somewhat related is the The Rock-afire Explosion band from ShowBiz Pizza Place. There is an excellent documentary on the history and some of the fans preserving the technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTmhS6hcY-A

I won't miss Chuck e, but rock a fire.... that's my child hood right there

These are a good example of how robots without haptic feedback are trivial.

Old tech that's only useful for entertainment (like movies) at a distance and still expensive.

It sounds like you are saying that robots without haptic feedback are useless?

If so that is not quite right. I regularly use computer controlled cutters, plotters and 3d printers. Not any of them have any feedback while they operate really. They are all robots, and they are quite usefull.

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