In any case, who dreamed up the all the little skits that the characters had to do?

"Mike Hatcher. He was a really good programmer, a puppeteer, and a screenwriter. He wrote and designed the authoring system that programmed the units," Bushnell said. "He'd sit back with the impresario and program the movements one at a time, basically to coordinate with a tape."

The San Jose Mercury News ran a short story about Hatcher in 1979 that revealed the following facts: 1. It took him three hours of programming for every one minute of animation. 2. There were often 200 movements going on at once during the shows. 3. Poor Hatcher had to work the graveyard shift.

But how'd the characters actually move? Did they have motors?

"No, they were all pneumatic," Bushnell explained. "Factories are run on pneumatic. The [components] are cheap and they never wear out. They just run and run and run. It's probably the most robust motion technology in the world."

Yes, pneumatic as in pneumatic tubes! And how'd they build the animatrons?

"You start with the armature and then you dress it. Pretty much they were the same inside. There were two different jaws, if you're a dog versus Mr. Bunch. If you were a snout animal, you had a different jaw. We also had one for beaks."

I wanted to know, though: did Bushnell take the animatronic bits seriously? Like, did he see them having their own trajectory, one with lots of potential?

"We saw them as being our advertisement and our freebie," he said. "We tried to assume that if people came back every month, they'd want to see something different. So we tried to change the skit every month."

That's not to say that they didn't work hard at improving the acts.

"We went through a phase where we would have separate rooms with lounge acts. The cabaret, for example. We had an Elvis impersonator. We had a Dolly Dimples, which was a piano torch singer," he said. "They had personalities and you know, Chuck E. Cheese was a wise guy, kind of abusing the other people. The hound dog was stupid as shit, so it was a great thing for Chuck E. to be describing something really slowly and dumbed down. Mr. Munch who loved to eat everything. He was kind of our Cookie Monster, and we took the Cookie Monster and turned him into a garbage can with a vacuum to suck stuff out of your hand."

But did he truly see it as interactive entertainment or just some hokie crap? Despite his answer below, I'm not sure I truly know how he feels about his creations.

"I saw it absolutely as interactive entertainment. Understand the timeline. I started Chuck E. just before I sold Atari to Warner and Warner didn't want to have anything to do with it. They said 'Sell it,' and I said, 'I'll buy it,' and they sold it to me. I was still CEO of Atari and building the restaurants on the side. I had a president of the restaurants and he got the technology and the licensing. Then restaurants started just coining money and then after the sale, [Warner's people got] tired of me and I was tired of them, so it was very easy for me to spend full time working on Chuck E. Cheese. We built it up to about 250 restaurants before I sold out."