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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."
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.
..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.
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
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)
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.