Chuck E. Cheese still uses floppy disks in 2023, but not for long

On Sunday, a Chuck E. Cheese worker named Stewart Coonrod posted a TikTok video that paperwork the method of putting in a brand new song-and-dance present on an previous Chuck E. Cheese animatronics system—a course of that includes a 3.5-inch floppy disk and two DVDs. Coonrod says it’s the final replace earlier than his retailer undergoes a rework that may take away the animatronics altogether.

Coonrod’s Chuck E. Cheese location in Darien, Illinois, was originally a Present-Biz Pizza restaurant however modified over to Chuck E. Cheese branding in 1991. It features a single Chuck E. Cheese animatronics character (known as “Cyberamics” within the parlance of the corporate) surrounded by 4 video screens in a setup known as “Studio C,” first introduced in 1998.

Presently, these 25-year-old setups are being phased out nationwide in favor of a rework that replaces the animatronics character with a dance flooring. It is the tip of the road for Cyberamics, however a couple of shops nonetheless use them, and the guardian firm ships out updates on floppy and DVD to match the legacy system.

“Good day everyone, in the present day I’ll be displaying you methods to set up a brand new present on our previous system,” says Coonrod within the video. “That is going to be the final present we obtain earlier than the rework. So that is my final probability to movie and present you the way we do it.”

The TikTok video incorporates a tall, black “Cyberstar” rack-mount laptop system that dates from round 1998, which is when Chuck E. Cheese transitioned the Studio C video showtape from LaserDisc to DVD. Coonrod inserts a 3.5-inch floppy disk—which might maintain 1.44 MB of knowledge—that reads “Chuck E. Cheese Evergreen Present 2023” on a printed label.

As the pc involves life, a monitor sitting on high of the rack shows a MS-DOS-style textual content crawl that exhibits the pc extracting .CEC information from a self-extracting file known as EGREEN23.EXE that was compressed utilizing the v2.50 shareware model of PKSFX by PKWARE, copyright 1999. The .CEC file format consists of light-timing info and directions that inform the animatronics figures methods to transfer. (Anybody interested by exploring the CEC format can discover a disk picture of a 2017 Chuck E. Cheese floppy on the Web Archive.)

After that, Coonrod inserts two DVDs into twin DVD gamers that comprise present video content material of the accent characters that encompass Chuck in the course of the present.

“There it goes,” he says, after getting into a password into an archaic backlit LCD panel, and Chuck begins his final dance, the end result of a robotic legacy that stretches again to 1977. And he’ll maintain dancing till they pull the plug later this 12 months.