In the year of our lord 2023, Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks to make the animatronic mouse dance
Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre is a chain that has its origins in videogames. It was the passion project of Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell who, flush with success in the 1970s, saw the opportunity to get his concept for a family friendly restaurant that was also an amusement venue off the ground. It served pizza because, in Bushnell’s words, there were “very few components, and not too many ways to screw it up”, and the centrepiece of the restaurants would become animatronic shows starring a coyote.
Except, when Bushnell bought the first costume, it turned out to be for a rat. Wiser heads persuaded Bushnell not to call the chain Rick Rat’s Pizza, and thus Chuck E. Cheese was born.
The animatronic element of Chuck E. Cheese is a weird old thing, I’ve only seen it once and that was quite enough: slightly mothbitten and gaudy. These days the chain has decided the rat’s now a trendy mouse but, in some ways, it remains old school: In a recent viral TikTok (via Ars Technica), a Chuck E. Cheese employee called Stephen Coonrod shows how these animatronics are made to dance using floppy disks.
Coonrod shows off the 3.5-inch floppy disk, which holds up to 1.44MB of data and is branded with the Chuck E. Cheese logo and a “Chuck E. Cheese Evergreen Show 2023” stamp, before loading it into a large computer bank (a Cyberstar rack-mount system) connected to both the floppy drive and various DVD players. Not all Chuck E Cheese locations still use floppies (less than 50 restaurants of over 600 worldwide) but for those that do the programs are written in-house and contain the dance routines for the animatronic animals, and are accompanied by DVDs which play the light show, background visuals and music around them.
The particular setup in Coonrod’s location is called Studio C. It features one animatronic accompanied by four screens, and is 25 years old.
@showbizpizzaman (opens in new tab)
How to install a new show at Chuck E. Cheese
♬ original sound – Stewart (opens in…..