You hear the blurps and bloops after you pass the food court in the Mall of Georgia on a fall Sunday afternoon, the unmistakable sound of points being scored and players eliminated.
Then you see him: Standing in an oversize vitrine is a 6-foot-tall animatronic rodent. He’s grinning and waving, but frozen in place, preserved like a museum piece.
This isn’t an outpost of Chuck E. Cheese, the 48-year-old family pizza chain with more than 460 restaurants in 45 states and another 88 abroad. It’s Chuck’s Arcade, a fledgling new enterprise launched this past summer by parent company CEC Entertainment in an effort to expand the brand’s reach to Gen Xers, nostalgic millennials, and teens who have outgrown the flagship.
These 13-and-counting old-school arcades are crammed with a dizzying mix of options—elaborate games like Drakons Realm Keepers (flying dragon battles); games tied to Marvel and Jurassic Park and the NBA; arcade classics like Tempest; and analog options like Skee-Ball and air hockey. This one, in Buford, Georgia, draws a steady afternoon crowd of couples, families, and packs of teenagers. A pair of giggly tweens take a furtive selfie with the animatronic Chuck near the door.
Five years after the pandemic plunged Chuck E. Cheese into its second bankruptcy, the brand is showing surprising energy. In addition to launching the new arcades in exurbs and mid-tier cities around the country, it has redesigned most of its restaurants in the U.S. and expanded its menu; most recently, it announced another spin-off focused on physical “active play.”
And its financial picture appears to be stabilizing. While the company reportedly struggled earlier this year to raise funds to meet debt payments, in September it closed a $625 million private credit term loan, and ratings agency S&P Global forecast that the company’s 2025 same-store restaurant sales will grow between 2% and 2.5%.
CEO David McKillips is not shy about his view of the brand’s potential. Since he took the helm, in 2020, the company has begun to leverage the intellectual property around Chuck E. Cheese, the character, inking several dozen licensing deals that have put the friendly rodent’s likeness on apparel, toys, frozen pizza, and more. A Chuck E. Cheese Christmas—an animated holiday special featuring not just Chuck but also his sidekick characters—debuted on Amazon Prime on Thanksgiving Day.
All of this may seem like a long-shot vision for a brand that’s been more associated recently with cheap punch lines (California governor Gavin Newsom told Vice President JD Vance on social media that “ONLY SOMEONE WITH A LAW DEGREE FROM CHUCK E. CHEESE COULD BE AS DUMB AS YOU!!!”) and squalid Florida Man cringe (last July, a video of an employee being arrested on fraud charges while wearing his Chuck E. costume went viral).
But the CEC executives spin it differently. “It’s impactful when Chuck E. Cheese is in the news, good or bad,” says Mark Kupferman, the company’s chief insights and marketing officer. “Chuck E. Cheese’s Q scores are amazing.”
Shawn and Shelbie Moseley, a couple in their thirties who are making their second visit to Chuck’s Arcade today, share a fondness for Chuck—and the animatronics that used to be the chain’s signature. Shawn has enjoyed several YouTube documentaries about them. “Nostalgia,” he says with a knowing grin.
It’s a sentiment that CEC is banking on. The company estimates that around 24 million kids, across four generations, have celebrated a birthday at Chuck E. Cheese.
“My IP dream is a global movie release,” McKillips says, citing Shrek, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the cross-generational appeal of a Pixar property as reference points. “I won’t stop until we have a movie. There are theme park opportunities, gaming opportunities. . . . I’m not done until every 5-year-old is going to sleep in their Chuck E. Cheese pajamas and waking up and having Chuck E. Cheese cereal.”
Nostalgia is an exercise in selective memory. And people remember things differently: One fan’s classic is another fan’s kitsch. Few brand mascots embody this tension better than Charles Entertainment Cheese.
Born as “a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent,” as Benj Edwards reported in Fast Company in 2017, Chuck first appeared alongside his animatronic bandmates— co-vocalist Helen Henny, guitarist Jasper T. Jowls, keyboard player Mr. Munch, and Pasqually on drums—at a pizza-and-entertainment restaurant that opened in San Jose in 1977.
In those days, arcades seemed vaguely shady—hangouts for directionless teenagers. Chuck E. Cheese, as the chain came to be called, offered a family-friendly alternative with games, pizza, and music, geared to delight 2-to-12-year-olds.
Yet the concept always had deeper undercurrents. It was developed and tirelessly championed by founder Nolan Bushnell, the eccentric, visionary tech entrepreneur who also cofounded Atari (and was Steve Jobs’s first boss). He had sought to evoke the mix of technology and carnivalesque ritual that he saw at the heart of collective human culture.
And Chuck was a rat only by accident. Turns out Bushnell had always wanted to start a pizza parlor and had the name Coyote Pizza in mind. In the mid-1970s, not long after cofounding Atari, Bushnell ordered what he thought was a coyote costume—but it turned out to be a rat costume. Trotted out as a regular gag at Atari company events, the character became known alternately as Rick Rat and Big Cheese. Bushnell floated the idea of calling his restaurant Rick Rat’s Pizza, but his marketing folks intervened, coming up with an alternative: Chuck E. Cheese. The first restaurant had a sign out front reading “Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre,” and by the mid-1980s, it had become a chain, with more than 240 locations. Hampered by overexpansion and a slew of copycats, the company went into its first bankruptcy in 1984.
Bushnell resigned, and ShowBiz Pizza, a rival, bought the company in 1985, returning it to a suburban fixture again throughout the 1990s and 2000s. By the time Apollo Global Management bought the 577-location chain for $1.3 billion in 2014, Chuck had morphed into a cheerful adolescent, and, in the iPhone age, the animatronics were feeling antiquated.
McKillips, formerly a Six Flags executive, paid his first visit to a Chuck E. Cheese on a Saturday in Grapevine, Texas, in 2019, and says he found the brand environment “tired” and “dated.” But just as he was about to leave, there was a verbal countdown to the arrival of Chuck himself. “It was like a Taylor Swift concert,” he recalls. “Kids were going bananas. And I was like, This is fricking awesome.” He left a 13-plus-year career at Six Flags to become CEO in January 2020—just as COVID-19 hit.
Unexpectedly presiding over the chain’s second bankruptcy (filed in the summer of 2020 as diners stayed home), McKillips and his board raised $650 million in bonds, and ultimately spent $350 million to revamp its locations. “COVID was a little bit of a blessing in disguise,” he says. The brand was “crushed” for a time, and obviously the human toll on laid-off workers was severe. “But it allowed us to pause and really look at the business.”
There’s a choice that youth-focused brands grapple with: Do we grow up with our audience—or stay forever young? Chuck E. Cheese had always been in the forever-young business, but had, McKillips felt, lost touch with today’s kids. Winking satires in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (the Risk E. Rat’s Pizza and Amusement Center) and the horror movie Five Nights at Freddy’s didn’t help.
Out went Munch’s Make Believe Band, as Chuck E.’s animatronic musical group was called. In came an interactive dance floor, with a jumbotron and Kidz Bop as an official music partner. Arcade games stayed, but the interiors got brighter and featured “adventure zone” areas with trampolines and “superhero playgrounds.” And the pizza got better. During COVID-19, the company converted its kitchens into ghost kitchens for its new delivery and takeout brand, Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings. In the process, the company reformulated its pizza recipe and expanded its menu with more toppings and options than it had ever bothered with before, an experiment that resulted in a new adult menu when its dining rooms reopened and the ghost kitchen brand was retired in the spring of 2025.
The business model changed too. Borrowing a tactic from the amusement park industry, the chain started to offer a variety of seasonal and annual passes—such as a $49 Summer Fun pass for unlimited visits for eight weeks—providing discounts in a belt-tightening era, guaranteeing steadier revenue, and cementing loyalty. Chuck E. Cheese sold 79,000 passes in 2023. The next year, it sold nearly 400,000.
Since the beginning, Chuck E. Cheese has been, on some level, a tech company. Today, its main restaurant chain is “the largest arcade in the world” and the biggest buyer of games, McKillips says. “We have 2 billion gameplays every single year.”
The company opened a handful of arcades in malls in 2024, called the Fun Spot Arcade, which flopped. But Kupferman, the company’s chief insights and marketing officer (and another Six Flags veteran), began envisioning a new stand-alone arcade business that could carry Chuck E. Cheese branding. McKillips was resistant. “Doesn’t fit,” he recalls thinking. “We are about age 2 to 12, wholesome, safe family entertainment.” They ended up leaving the modern version of the mouse with the children’s pizza chain but using “traditional Chuck E.,” the retro version associated with the 1980s and 1990s, for the arcade.
When the first Chuck’s Arcade launched in 2025, its logo featured the “nostalgic” version of Chuck, with the bowler hat and bow tie, and a salvaged animatronic rodent greeted people at the door. While the company won’t share specific data, a spokesperson says the switch to Chuck’s Arcade from Fun Spot has had “a very positive effect” on the performance of each location. A typical visitor, whether a teen or a 50-year-old, buys a $50 game card and exhausts it over an hour or so.
Now the company is making another play for its millennial and Gen Z fans, this time alongside their Gen Alpha kids, with Chuck E. Cheese Adventure World. The first location—11,300 square feet, or 10 times the typical size of an active play zone in one of its restaurants—just opened in Arlington, Texas, in November. Features include slides and tunnels, climbing zones, a dance floor, and “exclusive character appearances” (as well as snacks, but curiously, no pizza). The company says it will test a handful of locations before setting any full rollout goals.
As for the flagship chain, the company is currently leveraging all those new screens for its CEC Media Network, announced in May—a de facto television network utilizing almost 4,000 screens across hundreds of Chuck E. Cheese locations. Appealing to today’s screen-focused kids, this in-restaurant network plays selections from a library of original entertainment content, with more than 300 digital shorts featuring Chuck E. and the band, as well as partner content from Kidz Bop and others. “We are using that as a promotional platform, selling advertising, creating a new revenue model,” McKillips says. It’s seen by 40 million visitors a year.
The company is also working with streaming technology provider Future Today to expand the CEC Media Network beyond the restaurants. CEC-branded channels now exist on other platforms, such as Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, and Future Today’s own family-friendly platform, HappyKids.
But for some, watching a screen isn’t as entertaining as interacting with it, and that’s what Chuck’s Arcade is for. Back at the Mall of Georgia, a young boy and his mom play a seated, two-player virtual reality game that involves fighting a frantic array of monsters, including Godzilla, from an armed helicopter. The kid is ecstatic, blasting away at monsters and feeling the effects supplied by the VR headset. “Mommy, we’re flying so high!” he squawks, but Mom doesn’t answer. She’s blasting away, too, lost in the game.
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