Travis Schafer didn’t grow up with much. His parents worked low-wage jobs, and he remembers how special it felt to once eat a mini box of brand-name Trix cereal.
“We probably could have been on food stamps and subsidies if my dad wasn’t too proud to take that stuff,” he says.
But he did have Showbiz Pizza Place. An early incarnation of the company that would become Chuck E. Cheese, Showbiz was a pizza parlor with arcade games and dancing animal robots called animatronics.
“Getting to go to Showbiz was as close to going to Disneyland as I was ever going to get,” he says.
Animatronic members of Munch’s Make Believe Band take the stage at Chuck E. Cheese in Northridge, California. (Photo by Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Forty years later, Schafer lives, eats, and breathes Chuck E. Cheese. He is a Chuckhead, the affectionate term for adult fans of the entertainment restaurant chain that’s geared toward children.
Schafer takes his 13-year-old daughter along to conventions, and gifted her animatronics for Christmas. He runs ShowbizPizza.com, compiling a crowd-sourced archive of the company’s history whose contents have, at times, nearly brought him to tears. He rents two storage lockers for his collection of Chuck E. Cheese artifacts — dolls, records, art, t-shirts, watches, tokens, pins, and animatronic creatures.
But Schafer doesn’t just collect and document the history of Chuck E. Cheese. He and other Chuckheads are determined to see the retro charm of their favorite entertainment chain preserved.
The evolution of a mascot. (Provided by Damon Breland)
That desire is at odds with the company’s vision, which in recent years has included trampolines, screens, and a different pizza recipe than the greasy slices that defined millennial childhoods across the country.
So how does a company with a firm foothold in the adult nostalgia market modernize without leaving its diehard fans behind?
More than arcade games
Back in the mid-1970s, an engineer named Nolan Bushnell made millions off the success of his company, Atari Games. Still, he couldn’t help but notice that the arcade games he was selling for $2k a pop would then earn their owners $50k in coins over their lifespan.
So, he created his own establishment for the games, so he could earn a larger slice of the proverbial pizza.
He thought about calling it Coyote Pizza, after a coyote costume he picked up in Florida. When he learned the costume was actually a rat, it became Rick Rat’s Pizza, before the marketing department nixed that. Finally, he settled on Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre. The first location, in San Jose, California, opened in 1977.
Nolan Bushnell serves up a pizza at an original Pizza Time Theatre location. (Photo by Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Three years later, a rival chain called Showbiz Pizza Time, with a competing animatronics band (Rock-afire Explosion), competing pizza and competing arcade games, opened too. And a few years after that, Showbiz bought out Pizza Time Theatre to create a live-entertainment pizza empire under one Chuck E. Cheese umbrella.
The merger also led to something unexpected: a legion of superfans known as Chuckheads.
The Chuckheads fell in love with all things Charles Entertainment Cheese as children: the pizza, the retro arcade games, and especially the band of animatronic robot characters, led by Chuck himself, that put on a show every night. And, like Disney adults, their passion has endured.
Damon Breland has spent 20 years chasing the feeling Chuck E. Cheese gave him as a kid. “The Chuck E. Cheese that I grew up with was a vacation without a vacation,” he says.
Damon Breland poses with his Chuck E. Cheese collection. (Provided by Damon Breland)
He remembers when you could take your straight-A report card in and get free tokens in exchange. “Mom and Dad never had to tell me to study,” he says. He’d clamber into a rocket ship or an airplane and grin as it carried him into the air.
He’s criss-crossed the country in rental cars dragging U-Hauls behind him, building a collection of memorabilia that rivals only Travis Schafer’s in its breadth. Across the road from his home in Little Improve, Mississippi, he has recreated an original Showbiz Pizza Time location he calls Smitty’s Super Service Station, an adapted service station that now houses his collection.
“When this started, it was wanting to relive part of my childhood,” he says. “And then it just started morphing.”
He runs Smitty’s as an appointment-only museum, when he’s not working in IT, spending time with his wife and three children, or sourcing parts to restore his animatronics to working order. Fans from as far as Alaska have made the pilgrimage to Smitty’s to marvel at his den of curiosities.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
Breland estimates he’s spent $10k a year for the last 20 years on items as big as an original animatronic Rock-afire Explosion band purchased from its creator and as small as the tokens once used to play Skee-Ball in the arcade.
“I don’t toy with the numbers much, because I don’t want to think about it, and because I look at it as an investment in the future, a retirement nest egg,” he says.
In today's market, an animatronic will run you $8k to $15k, depending on condition, not accounting for shipping or transport. On eBay, smaller pieces like tokens and tickets go for a few dollars a piece. Plush dolls cost between $20 and $50.
“And from there, the sky’s the limit,” he says.
Taylor Jackson spent much of her childhood feeling neglected and lost, and Chuck E. Cheese gave her an escape from that reality.
She’d stand wide-eyed and expectant, waiting for the curtain to draw back and reveal the animatronic Chuck E. she’d come to see, or scoop plastic bumblebees into a honeypot in the arcade, eager to earn as many tickets as she could.
“There’s not a lot of things about my childhood that give me good memories,” she says. “It was one of the things that I held on to.”
Jackson has amassed a collection of her own. She recently acquired a stage, which she rebuilt in her Indianapolis garage, and has camped out behind shuttering Chuck E. Cheese locations to nab signs and games as staff carry them out to the dumpster.
When friends outside the fandom catch a glimpse of the time capsule that is her garage, they laugh with wonder.
“They’re like, did you rob a Chuck E. Cheese?”
Taylor Jackson on an original “Studio C” stage. She now has a Studio C stage of her own in her garage. (Provided by Taylor Jackson)
Her current white whale is a 32m Studio C bot, an animatronic Chuck E. Cheese that can move in 32 ways. She’s got the perfect empty stage waiting for it.
But outside of her garage, Chuck E. Cheese has marched into the future. When Jackson walked into a restaurant in 2022 with her own children, expecting to see her beloved animatronic Chuck E. Cheese, she saw a 2-D silhouette on the wall where he used to be.
“It was heartbreaking,” she says.
Chuckheads vs. Chuck E. Cheese
Chuck E. Cheese continued to expand through the 2000s, eventually reaching nearly 600 locations worldwide. By 2014, it was struggling. A private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, swooped in to buy the publicly traded company for $1.3B in a leveraged buyout, saddling it with serious debt.
Starting in 2017 and continuing into the early 2020s, the company started to retire its animatronics and modernize its ~500 locations with healthier menus, live costumed mascots, trampolines, video screens, and interactive dance floors to better appeal to their customers aged two to 12.
At the time, the company said they believed kids these days have higher expectations of “realism and special effects.” The changes would also cut costs, saving on animatronics maintenance and centralizing entertainment offerings.
Chuck E. Cheese 2.0 stores got a makeover many of its fans didn’t love. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The backlash was fervent.
Fans signed petitions. Others camped outside stores, trying to nab an animatronic or two before they were scuttled. Online, fans excoriated the bright lights and banality of the revamp so aggressively that the company’s chief marketing officer paid the Reddit forum a visit to quell concerns.
“To say that you like [the changes] has a level of hatred behind it in this fandom that’s hard to describe,” Schafer says.
One Chuckhead, Chris Bower, took action.
Bower, who grew up going to Chuck E. Cheese (then Showbiz Pizza Place) in Flint, Michigan, sells artwork at comic conventions. On the side, he runs a YouTube channel documenting his travels and reviewing restaurants along the way.
He started visiting Chuck E. Cheeses across the country, spurred on by fans who hoped he would capture their favorite spots before they changed forever. (He made it to 123.)
When a photo of a decaying animatronic found in a landfill hit the internet, the backlash intensified.
A sad landfill animatronic. (Reddit)
“I was doing videos showing these completely butchered animatronics,” Bower says. “I’d say, listen, this is a bad policy. You are hurting your brand.”
And then something happened that surprised everyone: the company actually listened.
The compromise
Two years ago, Chuck E. Cheese Entertainment held a board meeting, during which Bower says they played some of the fandom’s videos. After that, executives announced another change: they’d keep one location open and running the old animatronics, calling it a legacy store.
“When they announced the first legacy stage, they said, this is the only one we’re doing,” Bower says. “When there was such a positive response, they thought, wait a minute. There’s still a few more of these.”
Chris Bower says walking into the company’s legacy store in Northridge, California, felt like walking back into 1993. (Provided by Chris Bower)
The announcements kept coming: they’d preserve one legacy store in Pineville, North Carolina, and two more in Nanuet, New York, and Hicksville, New York.
“Everybody was just rejoicing,” he says. “There was just so much happiness.”
Last month, they announced a legacy store in Toronto, Canada, bringing the total to six.
“That was us. That was our voices being heard,” Damon Breland says.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
Bower, who went to school for archaeology, views his preservation of Chuck E. Cheese as still doing that work, albeit for a kind of history most people don’t think about as such. “There’s a real gap in what people think is important or historic,” he says. “Fast food isn’t even in the top 100, but it affects everyone’s everyday life.”
Greater than joy
One of the things that makes Chuck E. Cheese unique, says Virginie Kharé, is that it has managed to reinvent itself to appeal to generation after generation of kids.
“They’re aware of when it’s time to reinvent themselves,” says Kharé, an associate professor of international business and marketing at Eckerd College in Florida. “The mouse is now a rock star. They’re very good at reimagining the company.”
Today, they’re imagining it as something that tries to carve out space for its adult fandom through Chuck’s Arcade, a new off-shoot brand that launched this summer targeting adults and “lifelong fans.” They’ve even put some old animatronics on display. (Chuck E. Cheese Entertainment Inc. didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from The Hustle.)
“They’re trying to go after that nostalgia market,” she says. “I think it’s too soon to say how it’ll work. My first visit, it was pretty empty.”
A section of Travis Schafer’s Showbiz Pizza collection near Denver, Colorado. (Provided by Travis Schafer)
And while Travis Schafer acknowledges that the company is struggling again under the weight of its debt load, and might not make it past its 50th birthday in 2027, he believes the fandom will endure long after the company does.
“As an adult, the one thing nobody ever tells you is you spend the majority of your life trying to connect to a place and time that doesn’t exist anymore,” he says.
Together, the Chuckheads have found more than a way to relive the joy they once felt as kids. They’ve found community.
Jackson says her best friends are other fans. Breland and Bower have shared pizza together. Schafer met his fiancée, Tabitha, who has a collection of Chuck E. Cheese pins to rival his own, in the fan forums. Their combined collection now resides with them in a small apartment near Denver.
“The fandom will survive no matter what,” Schafer says. “There’s always going to be a fondness for it. There’s nearly 50 years of history that people are going to want to remember.”
At the very least, there’s a couple in Colorado that’ll have a lot of old-school mice decor in their living room.
