About UsChuck E. CheeseIn 1977, while at Atari, Bushnell purchased Pizza Time Theatre from Warner Communications. 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. The Pizza Time Theatre / Chuck E. Cheese's also had animatronic animals that played music as entertainment. (Bushnell had always wanted to work for Walt Disney, but was continually turned down for employment when he was first starting out after graduation; Chuck E. Cheese's was his homage to Disney and the technology developed there.) In 1981 Bushnell turned over day-to-day food operations of Chuck E. Cheese’s to a newly hired restaurant executive and focused on Catalyst Technologies.
Through 1981 and 1982, Bushnell concentrated on subsidiaries Sente Technologies and Kadabrascope. Sente was a reentry into the coin-operated game business and Kadabrascope was an early attempt at computer assisted animation. In 1983 as the restaurants started to lose money, Sente, though profitable, was sold to Bally for $3.9 million and Kadabrascope was sold to Lucas which became the beginnings of what became Pixar. During this time Bushnell was using large loans on his Pizza Time stock to fund Catalyst. Bushnell also became more and more involved in sailing and campaigned "Charlie" to the first to finish trophy in the Transpac Yacht race from Newport to Honolulu. By the end of 1983, Chuck E. Cheese was having serious financial problems. President and long-time friend Joe Keenan resigned that fall. Nolan tried to step back in, blaming the money problems on over-expansion, too much tweaking of the formula and saturation in local markets by the management team. He resigned in February 1984, when the Board of Directors rejected his proposed changes. Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theaters (now named after its famous mouse mascot) entered bankruptcy in the fall of 1984. ShowBiz Pizza, a competing Pizza/Arcade family restaurant, then purchased Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre and assumed its debt. The newly formed company, ShowBiz Pizza Time, operated restaurants under both brands for a few years before unifying all locations under the Chuck E. Cheese's brand in the early 1990s. Today over 500 locations of this restaurant are in business |