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."

behind

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Cool to go to... once.

[Dancin_Santa]

CEC has always seemed like a gimmick. The food is bad, the service is worse, and the crap they called "fun & games" was so old and covered with years of detritus that getting into the ball room was like inviting a bacterial infection.

I guess making sure everyone only plays games in their own booths will help keep the germs at bay and localized into each customers' booth. However, I still question the longevity of a chain that refuses to cater to people who have tastebuds and wear shirts.

Tokens? Tickets?

[chillmost]

Will I get to use all my leftover Chuck E. Cheese tokens? What about my tickets from Skeeball? Can I trade those in for prizes still? This packrat mentality may have paid off after all.

Good luck Nolan

[vevva]

We were doing an exhibition recently (ATEI in London) for our retro-gaming table http://www.digitaltables.co.uk/ [digitaltables.co.uk] when in the middle of the show Nolan Bushnell made a point of visiting us on our stand.

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.

another idea of mine ... adopted

[dnab]

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...

Re:behind

[slashdot.org]

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...

That sounds pretty cool, but all I'd like is a restaurant where the tables have a button for "My drink is empty, I'd like another one, thank you".

It surprises the hell out of me that in places like here ("Silicon Valley") that is not more prevalent. After the dot-com crash service is pretty good, but it still happens from time to time that you spend 10 minutes or more trying to get the attention of the waiter. This is not where you want to spend your time; most of the times it appears rather rude because you have to ignore the other people at the table.

All they'd have to get is something similar to a flight-attendent call button, but even that appears to be too high-tech.