Chuck E. Cheese history

Warner finally sold the restaurant and concept ownership to Bushnell in June of 1978 for $500,000.

In November 1979 they found what they were looking for.

When Pizza Time went public in 1981 it increased Bushnell's worth to somewhere in the range of $70 million – much of it in Pizza Time stock.

In 1982 the contested lawsuit between Pizza Time and ShowBiz is settled out of court, with ShowBiz agreeing to pay Pizza Time a portion of its profits for the next 14 years – an expense estimated to be in the range of $50 million.

By July of 1983, Pizza Time was beginning to hemorrhage money, reporting their first loss ever at $3 million.

As problems continued to mount, Bushnell resigned as chairman and CEO on February 1, 1984.

In 1985 Richard M. Frank joined the company as president and CEO of ShowBiz, replacing Brock who remained CEO and chairman of Brock Hotel Corp.

An outside company Creative Presentations Inc. was hired to do some of the add-on retrofits such as the Liberty stage, which was installed system-wide across ShowBiz stores in 1986.

Also in 1987, the company acquired most of the assets of Montery House Inc. a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants.

In 1988, Brock Hotel Corp. changed its name to Integra-A Hotel and Restaurant Company, and spun off ShowBiz Pizza Time through a stock swap with shareholders.

However, by the end of 1989, there was no improvement in sales and the company decided to convert 26 of the units to a trendier concept, Monterey's Tex-Mex Cafes, and close the rest.

By September of 1990 all ties with Creative Engineering had been broken and nine ShowBiz stores had removed the Rock-afire Explosion characters, retrofitting them to resemble the Chuck E. Cheese characters.

ShowBiz reported same-store sales increases with a net income of $15.5 million on revenues of $253.1 million in 1992.

However, when the company announced lower-than-expected second quarter earnings in June 1993, its stock dropped 35 percent to $18.75 a share.

The name was then shortened to Chuck E. Cheese's by March 1994 after a redesigned concept.

Revenues for 1996 rebounded significantly to $294 million, while comparable store sales increased 9.8 percent and net income totaled $13.2 million.

In 1997 a new test stage called the Awesome Adventure Machine was test marketed.

For the first six months of the year, the company's stock rose from $23 to more than $40 per share, winning it a spot among the 'Top Ten Stock Performers' listed by Nation's Restaurant News in December 1998.

In July 1999, it acquired most of the remaining assets of the bankrupt Discovery Zone for $19 million.

The 300th company-owned location was opened in March of 2000, and franchised locations were aggressively purchased back by the company.

Plans to roll-out Studio C system-wide, with the original goal of reaching completion in 2002 never materialized, leaving many stores with much older animatronic shows that had been in operation for several decades.

Phase IV remodels began in 2004, featuring updated interior and exterior decor and a new company logo and color scheme.

In the summer of 2012 Chuck E. Cheese Entertainment, Inc. was ready to make some major changes to push the brand forward in a new direction.

In-store restaurant sales continued to decline through 2013 but merchandising and box office revenue increased.

In February 2014, Apollo Global Management acquired CEC Entertainment, Inc. for $54 per share, or about $950 million.

In August 2017, the company began to pilot a new design concept at seven remodeled locations (three in Kansas City, three in San Antonio, one in Selma, Texas), branded as Chuck E. Cheese Pizzeria & Games.

The proposed merger between CEC Entertainment and Leo Holdings Corporation was terminated on July 29, 2019.