The velvet rope, etc., is part of their elaborate system to keep strangers from walking off with kids.
As if.
I’ll bet they have a couple of extra kids left over at the end of every day.
I have learned the secret to surviving the Rats Hellhole that is Chuck E Cheese. First find a corner well away from the stage. Buy a gazillion tokens, pass out liberally. Ignore cries of Daddy!!! or Mommy!!, because there’s allways going to be at least a dozen of these kids with the talent of imitating your child’s voice to the tee, forcing you to dive in the maw (there’s always like a thousand kids) only to find some kid who’s not yours and also not in distress, but willing to show you the neat trick they can do in that damned gigantic erector set the kids play in. Most importantly have na occasional sip of wine and engage yourself in some deep philisophical, religious or policatal discourse. You’ll find that distracting enough to ignore those insane looking animatronics.
Stuffy
Who has to host a Chuck E. Rat party in two weeks. I must have thousand of those game tickets, probably enough to get a pencil or something.
Oh they would love for us to ignore them, that is when they would strike! Gotta keep your eye on those things every second. I swear, I checked under the bed last night before sleep, and I still saw rat like shadows on the walls when I woke from my night terrors.
You guys need to listen to Tim Wilson. He has a song called “Chuck E. Cheese Hell”.
Mine was probably one of the threads you read. My first visit felt like walking into a migraine.
I’ve since changed my tune, mostly because as my kid got older it got more fun for him and easier for us. I like weeknights, when it’s not busy. I avoid going on weekends.
They have this new game in there. With just ONE button. There’s a frog, and his tongue tip moves back and forth in his mouth, and it will shoot out when you push the button. You’re supposed to wait for his tongue to be lined up with a bug before hitting the button and he’ll nab it for points.
I love this game. I’m wishing I could find an online version to practice! I’m terrible at it, as I am at all video games, but the one-button premise is right up my alley. I think I could improve at it.
Back when my older nephew was four or five he got a party at CEC. It was at 1:00 PM on Friday afternoon. Of course Aunt Baker was invited, but I regretfully declined because I wouldn’t be off work yet.
Of course I made sure it would be a busy day, but the kid will never know. And I had a flexible boss who would have let me go early if I’d asked, but I didn’t. 
I just HAD to share this…
My best friend Patti was voted the best Chuck E. Cheese character actor in the entire district!! 
And I helped bring this about, because I shot and edited the video that went to corporate headquarters. Wow, it’s a weird place, though. Patti always said that working there is like going on an acid trip every day, but with more kids. And cheese. Lots of cheese. There are people that have “breakfast birthday parties” at 9:00 a.m. And yes, they do have pizza.
I think Showbiz Pizza was renamed to Chuck E. Cheese’s. I was a child around the end of Showbiz Pizza and I believe that Chuck E. Cheese was the “bear” thing you were thinking of. Now Chuck sports lime green skating gear in order to be “fly” or something.
So yes, I used to go there when I was younger (I’m 19 now). I don’t think I’ve been in one for at least ten years, thank goodness. I remember finding the animatronic beasts kinda weird but they didn’t creep me out. I’m sure they would now, though. I don’t remember the pizza being that bad either but, then again, I was in 1st grade. Maybe the pizza was better then? Who knows. I’m not heading to Hellrat’s place to check it out anytime soon.
I actually live in fear of Chuck E. Cheese. It’s true. The mere sound of that hell hole’s name being said out loud makes me shutter.
I have a Little Sister (I’m the Big Sister…as a volunteer) who very much ENJOYS this evil place. I find it to be like a Las Vegas Casino for those of elbow height. The noise! The stench! The helicopters that go up and down to nowhere!
Every week when I ask my Little Sis if there’s something she’d like to do, I have to prepare myself for the possibility that it could be this death of an activity. I have to have another activity ready that might be able to compete with THIS kind of stimulation. Nothing quite whips up the same frenzy, so I have to suggest things like an actual rocket launch or Disney World or something.
And believe me, this IS a serious DEATH of an activity. There’s very little social interaction (no matter how many games of hunched over, back-aching air hockey I try to get her to play) and the level of "diminishing financial returns is absurd! I spend $50 to get $12 worth of tokens, which then wins us a 3 cent “prize”?
My Little Sis happens to have dimples, so it’s difficult to tell her no. But I HAVE told her that I’d rather take her to the mall and spend the $50 on her and we get to chat and she gets to have something good to take home. That usually works.
I haven’t been to Chuck E. Cheese since a friend’s daughter’s birthday party. My boyfirend (at the time) seriously lamented the fact that he was too big to fit in the tunnel system. That’s when I knew it was time to break up.
My nephew, who was the brattiest kid I ever knew, got his first job at Chuck E.(Do the Chuckie movies flash in your head like mine does?) as the dude in the rat costume. Talk about poetic justice. No job is too bad after that, he said.
I was taken to that den of evil when I was a kid.
Shitty pizza, annoying perky asses who want you to smile and be happy to their expectation, and video games that you could only get to with a bullwhip and a taser.
I looked at the gestation chamber and the penis she married and asked them why they hated me.
It is moments like that which changes children into snipers.
He’s mighty fly, for a white mouse…
God, I feel old. I was about to start a post talking about how I liked Chuck E. Cheese as a kid, and how it was the place to have your birthday party … two decades ago.
Anyway, he who hesitates is lost, fools rush in, et cetera.
Chuck E. Cheese, Showbiz Pizza, and Circus Circus were the best birthday venues in the world. They had honest-to-god video games. They had pizza; shitty pizza, yes, but pizza nonetheless. They gave you free tokens for good grades on your report cards. And from my elementary school perspective, even the older kids hung out there and played video games and ate pizza!
It was Nirvana.
A few years ago, a coworker and I won third prize in a company talent contest with our unrehearsed juggling routine — a $100 gift card to Chuck E. Cheese. Memories came flooding back for us, both single men in our mid-20s, and we went there for lunch one day, intending to eat pizza, play video games, and relive some of the glory days of our youth.
The pizza was adequate. (Free pizza, no matter how bad, always tastes kind of good.) The video games were nonexistent, replaced with “games” of the kind that Cranky mentioned above. There was the traditional ball pit (with a half inch of urine on the bottom, certainly) and the traditional stage with the animatronic robots and their concert which kicked off every fifteen minutes.
We wanted video games. Wall-to-wall video games. Skeeball. Tickets coming out in sheets which you could trade in for really, really crappy merchandise. Some people may say that George Lucas has ruined their childhoods by altering Star Wars; my childhood was destroyed by visiting Chuck E. Cheese as an adult.
Still, though, we went back there every day for a week or two to use up the hundred bucks in free pizza.
Eh, flashing lights and noise…no problem.
Shitty pizza…no problem, just don’t eat it.
But the most horrendously awful thing about Chuck E. Cheese’s, something that should send a deep chill into the very soul of parents, is the fact that
THEY DON’T SERVE ALCOHOL!!
Good God!
[Mr. Welch]“Have you no sense of decency, Chuck?”[/Mr. Welch]
Enjoy!
You say this as if having pizza for breakfast is a bad thing. :dubious:
Y’know, alcohol might actually make the place bearable, now that you mention it.
I have made once visit to the Giant Rat Hell.
A dear friend lost her husband to cancer a while back. It was slow, and really very unpleasant. He died at home, and my wife stayed to help her out and run interference. I was asked to quietly escape with the kids, while the paramedics were summoned, to remove the body… and, being the big sweetie bear I am, I agreed.
So… where to go with a couple of confused little girls who know SOMETHING is wrong, but not quite what? Well, Chuck E. Cheese seemed like a reasonable thought.
Well, I was half right. They loved it. It struck me as an epileptic nightmare from hell. There were no video games, only weirdy-assed flashing electronic shit that didn’t seem to have any clear way to win. The pizza was literally swimming in grease; I had to blot mine with a half-dozen napkins before I could eat it, and two slices later, I wished I hadn’t. It was truly a loud, flashing horrible nightmare.
The kids ate it up. I’m glad. Their lives got kinda complicated for a while when they got home.
My first daughter hated pizza until she was in second or third grade. I never could understand what she disliked so much about it until she told me just a few years ago that the first pizza she could remember eating was at a birthday party…at Chuck E. Cheese’s.
I can’t stand Chuck E Cheese’s. The noise alone is bad enough, but the pizza is so bad that I just can’t eat it. PLUS it’s about the most expensive place around here to get pizza, then you have to buy all the tokens on top of it.
Fortunately, in our neck of the woods, we have Gattiland. It’s not perfect–still lots of noise and kind of pricy–but it’s MUCH better than Chuck’s. It’s a buffet, so you pay an entry fee, then get as much food as you want. Not only pizza, but lasagne, salad, tortellini… And it even tastes reasonably good. Plus the food’s there as soon as you walk in. No waiting in line to order the pizza, then waiting another half hour (by which time the kids are completely uninterested in food anyway) to get a cold, greasy, inedible pizza.
Gattiland also has the eating area completely separate from the play area. That means you can force the kids to eat a little before they get distracted, or if you just want to eat, you don’t have to suffer the noise of the games and screaming kids. There’s also a bar area for adults only.
The games are much more friendly, too, and give more tickets on average. (One game that my son discovered just has you drop a token through a slot, and it spews out tons of tickets each time you do it. No buttons to push or balls to roll or anything.) On top of that, you don’t need as many tickets to get decent toys. They have these cool ticket counting machines where you just feed the strip of tickets into the machine, and it prints out a receipt showing how many tickets you have. Frequent visitors can set up an account to make it easier to save for the really big toys over time.