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Chuck E. Cheese 2.0
theodp writes "Newsweek reports the inventor of Pong and founder of Chuck E. Cheese is getting back into the restaurant game. Adults welcome. At age 62, perpetual kid Nolan Bushnell wants to get gamers out of the house. This week, he will announce a new venture, the uWink Media Bistro restaurantchain. With screens at every table and bar stool, each piping videogames, media content and interactive menus, Bushnell's convinced a young-adult crowd will use the shared-gaming experience as a chance to compete, relax and mingle."
.. now with a coating of melted cheese
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I am living in Japan now and there's a family restaurant down the street that has terminals at every table where you can play games or read news and such. There's plenty of others like it too...
So I can go to a place to pay to play videogames at a table in a restaurant where everyone else is sitting in their own group or by themselves *also* staring at the table? Dude, I'll stay home and login somewhere and play a game, thanks.
People are highly overrated. Especially random strangers in a place that serves food.
Besides, most of what Chuck E. Cheese offered was something other than videogames. Actual physical things you could interact with.
CEC has always seemed like a gimmick. The food is bad, the service is worse, and the crap they called "fun & games" was so old and covered with years of detritus that getting into the ball room was like inviting a bacterial infection.
I guess making sure everyone only plays games in their own booths will help keep the germs at bay and localized into each customers' booth. However, I still question the longevity of a chain that refuses to cater to people who have tastebuds and wear shirts.
..Oh, you have to admit.. it'd be fun to show off your Morrowind character to the chicks in the coffee shop.
Is he going to dig up all of those old game cartridges from the Arizona desert to start the business?
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Food+games=sticky consoles.
Thanks but no thanks. I have enough trouble making my family wash their hands after eating before hopping on the conole/computer. I don't want to have to contend with something a hundred strangers used while eating.
Will I get to use all my leftover Chuck E. Cheese tokens? What about my tickets from Skeeball? Can I trade those in for prizes still? This packrat mentality may have paid off after all.
--Residential Interior Design
Toss it on the pile with the email, PDAs, text messengers, 2-way pagers, cell phones, and other gadgetry.
Probably not the most popular opinion to have on /., but I find the quality of communication, especially in-person communication, sadly lacking these days.
No one of consequence
The more I think about it the more I realize that the US is the wrong market .... Korea Japan Taiwan and China would however eat this idea up. .....
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Will they bring back the Chuck E. Cheese band? It just hasn't been the same is Jasper T. Jowls left over "creative differences".
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
He spent 10 minutes chatting to us about Pong, the first arcade games and the early days of Atari. He was a thoroughly nice guy and we felt honoured that he'd stopped by.
Good luck to him.
It's a place where people can come together, separated by age, background and station but bound in common by attention deficit disorder?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Gamers and food in one place... Can you image the smell?
Women will flee the county, houses downwind will lose value, skunks will congregate...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
its called Dave and Busters?
seriously: good food. good beer. tons of games? a place where you can walk around with a red stripe in hand. and play like LA machineguns and all the other assorted Chuck E Cheese games like the mole thing etc?
how is this any different from DaB? Diff age group maybe... DaB is over 21 after like 9pm - and its kind of expensive. But still, this is the best implementation of a "gaming restaurant" even if its more arcade than chuck e cheese type of games.
Plus, the place is kinda classy, like id take buisiness clients there and girls on dates. (provided of course.. i had clients to entertain or girls to take on dates, or vice versa)
i just dont see how this could oneup dave and busters. which stole my heart the first time i went. -nrs
I remember reading an interview with Ralph Baer in an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly several years ago. In it Baer asserted that he had created the game and patented it before Bushnell, and that Bushnell copied his concept.
The Wikipedia entry covers pretty much everything said in that interview:
"In 1966, Ralph Baer, then working for Sanders Associates, made a design for running simple computer games over a television set. His ideas were patented, and he created a game resembling Pong proper, except with slightly more complex controls. In 1970, Baer demonstrated his video game system to corporate heads at Magnavox, who became convinced that such a device would help sell more Magnavox television sets. Magnavox and Sanders Associates joined forces, with Baer and his patents at the epicenter, to develop a stand-alone unit called the Odyssey 1TL200 to be sold to consumers for use in the home."
"... Two weeks later, Magnavox learned of Pong, and notified Atari that they already had a patent on the concept. The two companies went to court. Magnavox was able to produce witnesses who had seen Nolan playing the Odyssey's ping-pong game, and they had a guestbook from the event which Nolan had signed. The judge found in favor of Magnavox, and Atari had to pay $700,000 for use of the patents."
As I recall, Baer also invented a boatload of other things, but didn't make much off of them because the patents were owned by the company he worked for at the time. (Memory is fuzzy on the details)
OMG someone has finally invented the PC Bang.
At last, PC Bangs exist. Previously they were confined to the world of fantasy.
(why yes... I _do_ have nothing better to do than be sarcastic today...)
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I remember seeing these guys at vending trade shows when I was in the jukebox biz. They were hawking touchscreen games back in 2000 or so (running Linux, praise be), but never seemed to get indeustry traction. Their website was finally reduced to a one-pager promising something New! and Improved! Real Soon Now for, oh, two years?
....
Hmm, I think they're on to something
Step 1: Write new biz plan.
Step 2: Raise lots of investor cash.
Step 3: Spend it.
Step 4: Lay low until new VC comes along.
Step 5: goto step 1
No "????" step, but no "Profit!" step either.
They spent huge money on trade show booths, that's for sure. But then again, who didn't?
No it's not stolen, just one of "if I have the VC money I'd do something about it" thing. But I'm not coming from the gaming/surfing/friendstering angle, even though every table would have an interactive LCD touch screen that can conceively do those things on the side. My evil master plan is to tie the interactive menu and the kitchen with the server that can, in real time, change the prices of the food. Why? Because a kitchen makes more money when several like orders are cooked simultaneously (certain conditions apply, of course). Also being an order tracking system a party can more or less be served at the same time. And other dreams of improving service quality w/ IT which I won't elaborate here.
Even got a name thought up. The Beta Platters
Having eaten in enough restaurants since this idea came about (1997) I then realized that nothing is more important than taste & location in determining a restaurant's success, and staff experience in its profitability. Maybe this might work with Denny's...
Chuck E. Cheese
It's disappointing to see anti-geek trolls proliferating here on Slashdot. Worse, to see suck sentiments getting modded up.
If you have to put on a facade to impress your date, then maybe you ought not take the girl to Chuck E. Cheese. If covering up who you are is more important than being who you are, it's probably a good idea to take her to a fancy restaurant where you two can pretend to enjoy yourselves.
As for me, if a girl can't handle that I live at my parent's home and enjoy eating pizza while playing the PS2, then that's her loss. I am not going to lower my standards to become embroiled in a fake relationship where we don't really know each other because we put on a fake smile and try to pretend to be more debonnaire than we really are.
I want a girl who is going to enjoy getting her fingers with Cheetos dust with me. My standards are high, and I'm not willing to compromise my sense of self just to impress someone else.
I totally agree. In the US, arcades died because most places were full of the same types of games you can play at home for free. Those and the ticket type games like skeetball. And most people don't enjoy those at all. The only reason people will leave home to pay for games is if it gets you something you can't get at home. Competition or a chance to show off your skills are two reasons that you just don't see much of anymore. That's why DDR type games remain popular. Want to make a good arcade? Put in lots of fighting games, DDR, and big moving machines. Networked driving games where each car moves would be another good idea. The point is to offer something you can't get at home and to bring people together. Next step is to maintain all those games!!! I long for the days of going to the local arcade and wupping some ass in street fighter. And if such a place still existed I'd be there in a minute.
I love the flexibility of this thing. The fact that the system is running linux and centralizes all the operations of the restaurant says they'll be able to change up the content as easily as a new download. Dave and Buster's, Chuck E. Cheese, etc all have big expensive games that get old and go out of date. The platform Bushnell is rolling out looks like it will have the flexibility to experiment with new games and tools at a very low cost. psyched to see it!