Enlarge / Stewart Coonrod holds up an official 2023 Chuck E. Cheese floppy disk in a TikTok video. It contains dance moves for in-store animatronics. (credit: Stewart Coonrod)
On Sunday, a Chuck E. Cheese employee named Stewart Coonrod posted a TikTok video that documents the process of installing a new song-and-dance show on an old Chuck E. Cheese animatronics system—a process that involves a 3.5-inch floppy disk and two DVDs. Coonrod says it is the last update before his store undergoes a remodel that will remove the animatronics altogether.
Coonrod’s Chuck E. Cheese location in Darien, Illinois, was originally a Show-Biz Pizza restaurant but changed over to Chuck E. Cheese branding in 1991. It includes a single Chuck E. Cheese animatronics character (called “Cyberamics” in the parlance of the company) surrounded by four video screens in a setup called “Studio C,” first introduced in 1998.
Currently, those 25-year-old setups are being phased out nationwide in favor of a remodel that replaces the animatronics character with a dance floor. It’s the end of the line for Cyberamics, but a few stores still use them, and the parent company ships out updates on floppy and DVD to match the legacy system.