On Sunday, a Chuck E. Cheese employee named Stewart Coonrod posted a TikTok video documenting the process of installing a new song and dance show onto an old Chuck E. Cheese animatronics system. And 2 DVDs. Coonrod says it’s the last update before his store undergoes a revamp that removes the animatronics entirely.
Coonrod’s Chuck E. Cheese location in Darien, Illinois was originally a Show-Biz Pizza restaurant and was rebranded as Chuck E. Cheese in 1991. Contains one Chuck E. Cheese animatronic character (called “Cyberamics”). company) first introduced in 1998, in a setup called “Studio C” where he is surrounded by four video screens.
Now these 25-year-old setups are being phased out nationwide in favor of mods that replace the animatronic characters with dance floors. , is still in use in some stores, and the parent company ships updates on floppies and DVDs to match legacy systems.
YouTube fan video for an up-close look at the Chuck E. Cheese stage in Darien, Illinois.
“Hi everyone, today I’m going to show you how to install a new show on an old system,” Kuhnrod says in the video. “This will be our last show before the renovation, so this is our last chance to film and show you how we are doing.”
The TikTok video features a tall black “Cyberstar” rackmount computer system that dates back to circa 1998 when Chuck E. Cheese moved his Studio C video show tapes from LaserDisc to DVD. Coonrod inserts a 3.5 inch floppy disk that can hold 1.44 MB of data. The printed label reads “Chuck E. Cheese Evergreen Show 2023.”
As the computer boots, the monitor at the top of the rack displays an MS-DOS style text crawl and the computer extracts the .CEC files from a self-extracting file called EGREEN23.EXE that was compressed using v2.50. is shown. Shareware version of PKSFX by PKWARE, copyright 1999. (Anyone interested in exploring the CEC format can find an image of him on his Chuck E. Cheese floppy disc from 2017 in the Internet Archive.)
Coonrod then inserts the two DVDs into the twin DVD player. This DVD contains show video content of accessory characters surrounding Chuck during the show.
After entering the password on the old-fashioned backlit LCD panel, he says, Chuck begins his final dance. It’s the culmination of a robotics legacy that dates back to 1977. And he keeps dancing until they pull the plug. Later this year.
