BY MENTIONING the story behind the very first Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre a few weeks ago, the author knew he would hit it off with certain crackpot historians who share a passion for the ignored slices of Silicon Valley history. But he was not prepared for the assemblage of historical bric-a-brac located upstairs in the storage rooms of the Chuck E. Cheese’s on Tully Road.
He found broken arcade games, old fixtures and signs, patches of original carpeting, piles of ancient tokens, decades-old electronics, benches, wires, vintage posters, giant tubing and pieces of long-defunct costumes. All it took was one source—we’ll call him Seymour—to provide the author with unlimited access, completely unbeknownst to anyone else in the entire three-story building.
Back in 1977, Nolan Bushnell of Atari opened the first Pizza Time Theatre on Winchester and the second one soon followed on Kooser, where it still sits today. The Tully facility, originally the biggest one at the time, opened in the former Magic Village Toy Store, on a triangular parcel, right at the southeast corner of the Tully and Highway 101 interchange. To this day, a giant statue of Chuck E. Cheese stands on the west side of the building, facing 101.
Seymour led me through a labyrinth of stairways, crooked corridors and freight elevators. We prowled through probably a dozen rooms, including a former upstairs training kitchen, the current tech shop and several junk storage areas. “This is where old video games go to die,” he explained. “Well, sort of. We still fix some of them.”
Back when the Tully restaurant actually sold beer, Seymour told me, it was second only to the Flea Market in total beer sold in Santa Clara County. As we navigated past old fixtures and a dead Battlezone arcade game, he also pointed out that some of the building’s circuit breakers actually still say things like “bicycles,” from back when the place was Magic Village 35 years ago.
Just three years ago, a few dozen rabid Chuck E. Cheese’s collector nerds from across the United States made a trip to California to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the place. Seymour was their point man for Silicon Valley. “Those guys were fanatics,” he recalled, shaking his head in disbelief.
Speaking of history, the process of how Chuck E. Cheese himself has changed over the years is downright fascinating. The first and now collectible version of Chuck was much more gangsterlike than the sanitized mousey Chuck one now sees. “He began as a rat, and now he’s a mouse,” Seymour explained. “And he no longer has whiskers.”
As we continued through the maze upstairs, we arrived at the obligatory storage room of ancient electronics. The Cyberamics Control System, for example, is what drove the pneumatic Pizza Time Theatre stage characters in the ’70s. Moments later, we paused at a bay window overlooking the 101 and Tully interchange, where Seymour continued to rattle off stories nonstop.
“Back in 1981, a store opened in Capitola,” he told me. “That was going to be their model store. But it only lasted for a few years.” According to Seymour, the French version of Playboy even sent a reporter to that particular Chuck E. Cheese’s to profile the whole place, along with its surfer-girl waitresses.
Thanks to Seymour and his tour of Pizza Time Theatre storage, the author is emboldened with still more appreciation for the ignored. Those who search out the forgotten history of Silicon Valley mustn’t end their quest with the Atari 2600. If the author gets his way in some fantasy version of the future, this wreckage of past Chuck E. Cheese’s oddities might someday be available for all to see. As he proclaimed once before, “If Greece and Rome can turn their ruins into tourist traps, then why shouldn’t San Jose?”
