Chuck E. Cheese is getting its own adult-aimed game show
The pizza chain is teaming up with Top Chef producers to make a game show where "big kids" play over-sized versions of classic arcade attractions
Aux News Chuck E. Cheese
Do today’s children enjoy the antics of noted pizza rat Charles Entertainment Cheese? We can’t imagine that they do, what with the modern child’s ready access to electronic entertainment and bad pizza in abundance, freeing them of the need to subject themselves to Chuck E. Cheese’s pervading aura of grease and decay in order to fulfil those urges. Hence, maybe, why the recently bankrupt pizza/arcade chain has taken its next step toward an entirely nostalgia-based economy, preying on the minds of aging former children—in this case, with a new game show aimed entirely at grown-ups, subjecting them to giant-sized versions of the chain’s various arcade attractions.
This is per The Hollywood Reporter, which notes that the chain is teaming up with Top Chef production company Magical Elves for a new game show, which will see “big kids” (the show’s term for “sad adults”) compete to earn tickets that they can take to a “massive version of the iconic Chuck E. Cheese prize wall,” where, presumably, they’ll be able to purchase over-priced, shoddily made versions of “big kid” things. (And while this will probably be things like cars and Jet Skis, we like to imagine contestants will also be able to pick out stuff like health insurance, student debt relief, and, for the biggest of winners, the ultimate in aging millennial luxury: Their own grave, complete with coffin.)
To win said tickets, the contestants will compete in over-sized versions of “pinball, air hockey, alley roller and the human claw.” (“Alley roller” is what you call Skee-Ball when you don’t want to kick any money to Bay Tek Games, Inc., the current owners of the Skee-Ball copyright, by the by.) And here is the insidious and horrifying power of nostalgia: This sounds pretty kick-ass, and we would like to be on it, just like we wanted to be on that adult version of Legends Of The Hidden Temple that crashed and burned on The CW a few years back. Nostalgia is a poison, is our point, and there is no cure.
18 Comments
I saw Chuck E. Cheese and “Adult” in the headline and pictured that dispute with an adult bookstore operating next to a Chuck E. Cheese.
I thought they had merged or something.
Nostalgia is a poison, is our point, and there is no cure….I thought Marion Cobretti was the cure?
You say that like there isn’t a band called The Cure.
This is a smart move. Adult children are a very lucrative demographic!
*waves hand at infinitely profitable nerd cultural industry*
lucky bahstahds
For an authentic experience, there should be challenges like “Avoid getting drawn into conversation with the friendless divorced dad who has his kids for the weekend” and “Use the restrooms without contracting anything”.
Grand prize is enough tickets to get that eraser that looks like a race car.
Nostlagia. A poison or an addiction or both?
I was born too soon for this place and didn’t have kids so I was, thankfully, never tempted by it’s charms. Never been inside the place. It always looked like what it is – gross and grossly pandering. Just yesterday I saw it refered to as “a casino with pizza” which turned “gross” into “disturbing.” Can’t it just quietly go the way of Blockbuster (which was actually a good place)?
Blockbuster also got a terrible TV show.
I think I was six the first time my dad brought me to one of these places. The sight of the caterwauling homunculi gyrating on stage terrified me. I started crying, we ended up leaving, and I don’t think we even got our pizza. A year or two later I was invited to kid’s birthday party at the local ShowBiz Pizza and just spent the week leading up to it in dread. It was a tremendous relief when the animatronics emerged and started singing a medley and I realized this wasn’t scary at all, it was just crappy. If there was a narrow window in which I would have enjoyed that kind of thing, I missed it.However, the arcade was pretty fun. I played Berzerk and the original Gauntlet for two hours!
If you think the highlight of Showbiz Pizza was supposed to be animatronics “singing” Terrence Trent D’Arby, and not the arcade games…you are honestly mistaken.
Trust me, no one thinks the animatronics are the highlight.
:O !!! They had animatronics?
I’m going to have worse dreams tonight.
I will never miss an excuse to post my favorite video on the internet, Concept Unification, wherein the Showbiz Pizza Rock-A-Fire Explosion band are nonchalantly stripped to their mechanical bones, only to be rebuilt and reborn as Munch’s Make Believe Band.
Instead of this post, the one above it about a horror movie accidentally got “for some damn reason” in its headline, for some damn reason.
(“Alley roller” is what you call Skee-Ball when you don’t want to kick any money to Bay Tek Games, Inc., the current owners of the Skee-Ball copyright, by the by.) Then what was the game with the bowling ball on rails?