SHowBiz Pizza Place
My love for Five Nights at Freddy’s is all because of my love for Showbiz Pizza Place as a kid. I remember I used to go to parties and got to have 2 or 3 birthdya parties there as well. I had great memories and I could see myself buying a Rock-A-Fire Explosion band if I were rich to creep me out at nights in my mansion. More than a history, this is a small tribute to a place that I hold dear to my heart.
This was all very early in my life so I barely remember much of it so any memories are mostly because of how damned awesome the place was. Imagine Chuck-E-Cheese’s but with more soul. This was during the height of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Craze and that only made Pizza that much cooler. I’m guessing the Pizza they served must’ve been good enough and it was served by people in costumes, how cool was that?
You’d gather to watch the show and I remember loving to check out the animatronic animals when they were off, creepy but cool, especially when you could see their eyes and you’d wonder if they could see you. No wonder FNAF is so popular, if only the kids that liked it had the context that this was a real thing.
The actual show from what I remember and have seen online isn’t something mindblowing but you were a little kid and just seeing animal robots perform and tell a small little story is more than enough while you enjoyed your Pizza. It was just the closing of the main event of the whole experience The rest of the experience were games all around Showbiz, especially the video games. I never played much arcade games as a kid but Showbiz was one of the places I got to play a lot of games and they had tons. I used all my tokens to play the games I liked including Turtles in Time. Not to mention all the play areas they had for kids.
There’s a documentary called Rock-A-Fire explosion which is a bit short and wish it had been a bit longer. It goes over the history of Showbiz Pizza which is super interesting. I wish they had spent a bit more with a different perspective of how it all happened but even as they have it, it’s a great little documentary. The fans though like those arcade era documentaries are all just sad to see and entertaining in a morbid way. This only makes the documentary better mind you but seeing these people who can’t let go is both fascinating and scary. I mean I’m glad there’s hardcore fans but at the same time don’t wish the same for me, just a little bit of nostalgia is all I need like this little tribute.
But yeah that documentary needs a little appendix, I mean I wonder how the owner became so politically insane and on other stuff like the guy who opened his own chuck-e-cheese without any knowledge in business. I was able to scrape from the internet where he mentions that he realized all the earnings in pizza buffets are in the number of people and didn’t have it and had to close it down for a while. But apparently he had to sell his animatronics and hosue and messed him up financially which made sense. Even had it been successful the whole thing screamed IP lawsuit from Chuck-E-Cheese’s parent company.
Pizza, video games, games, kids, animatronics. Showbiz Pizza. A great place for kids that does seem kinda creepy if you visualize it. And that appeal made me get into FNAF but that’s another story.