Man, that place was SO much cooler when it was Shobiz...
Oh, I mean "I hate that place, gimme beer!"
I wonder how long it takes to clean pepperspray out of that giant rat suit?
Chuck E Cheese was actually Pizza Time Theater until Nolan Bushnell (of Atari fame) bought it out. When Bushnell and the original owner of PTT clashed heads, the owner left and created Showbiz. Bushnell then proceeded to sue the hell out of Showbiz, and they ended up settling out of court with Showbiz agreeing to pay royalties to Chuck E Cheese. When the NES came out and everyone stayed at home to play their video games, Chuck E Cheese lost tons of money and Showbiz ended up buying it out, operating both chains with their original names. In the nineties, they started switching over all the stores to the Chuck E Cheese brand, but both shops had been run by the same company for almost a decade at that point. There's a pretty good brief history of the chain in The First Quarter, Steven Kent's excellent video-game history.
In the same book, there's an excerpt from an interview with Bushnell in which he says that the whole idea behind Chuck E Cheese was drawing kids in with the games, and then making all of their money off of selling the cheapest, crappiest pizza (and booze) to their parents at the biggest mark-up. The games were the razors, and the pizza was the blades.
