Chuck E Cheese vs ShowBiz Pizza | Rat Pizza | 1

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s 1976, and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell is on a mission to launch a family arcade disguised as a pizza parlor. He comes up with a name that’s impossible not to smile at—“Chuck E. Cheese”—and combines pizza, video games, and animatronic entertainment. The chain quickly becoming the go-to destination for a generation of American kids. And as business takes off, hotel mogul Robert Brock sees the potential to franchise, but after feeling misled by Bushnell, he demands their contract be torn up. Brock goes on to create a rival chain called ShowBiz Pizza Place, pitting his bear mascot, Billy Bob, against Chuck E. Cheese’s scrappy rat in an all-out battle for pizza parlor supremacy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wonderly Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of business wars beyond meat versus impossible
0:05.4	burger early and ad-free right now. Join Wonderly Plus in the Wondery app or Apple Podcasts.
0:15.8	May, 1977, San Jose, California.
0:23.6	Ted Dabney pulls into the parking lot of a windowless, single-story building.
0:28.6	Above the door, a sign reads, Chuckie Cheeses Pizza Time Theater.
0:33.6	Dabney is a 40-year-old former Marine with a horseshoe mustache.
0:38.3	Five years ago, he co-founded Atari, the company that kick-started the video game industry.
0:43.3	He no longer works there, but he's still friends with Atari's other co-founder, CEO Nolan Bushnell.
0:49.3	So he didn't hesitate when Bushnell asked him to check out his latest venture.
0:54.6	Bushnell described it as a pizzeria crossed with an arcade, where the main attraction
0:59.5	is an animatronic show to rival those at Disneyland.
1:04.1	Dabney enters and is hit with a wall of South.
1:08.0	Kids running wild, screeches of dozens of coin-operated video games, change machines gushing
1:13.6	quarters, staff shouting out order numbers. Ears reeling, Abney weaves through the tight rows of tables.
1:22.6	At one, there's a birthday party with balloons, paper cups full of soda, and a cake.
1:33.8	And on the walls looking down on it all is a cast of motionless animatronic animals poking out of picture frames.
1:35.6	At the counter, an acne-faced teenage girl in a t-shirt and flared jeans welcomes him.
1:40.8	Welcome to Chucky Cheese's Pizza Time Theater. What can I get you?
1:48.0	Yeah, I'll have a regular pizza with Canadian bacon and mushrooms. And give me a large root beer.
1:50.0	The teenager hands Dabney as drink and a fake coin, the size of a quarter.
1:55.0	That's your free game token so you can play while you ate.
1:58.0	Use the change machine if you want more.
	...

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