Nolan Kay Bushnell is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre chain. He has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, received the BAFTA Fellowship and the Nations Restaurant News "Innovator of the Year" award, and was named one of Newsweek's "50 Men Who Changed America". He has started more than 20 companies and is one of the founding fathers of the video game industry. He is on the board of Anti-Aging Games. In 2012, he founded an educational software company called Brainrush, that is using video game technology in educational software.
Farmington Hills is a city in Oakland County in the U.S. state of Michigan. A northwestern suburb of Detroit, Farmington Hills is located roughly 22 miles (35.4 km) from downtown Detroit. As of the 2020 census, the city's population was 83,986, making it the second-largest community in Oakland County.
Chuck E. Cheese is an American entertainment restaurant chain founded on May 17, 1977, by Atari, Inc.'s co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, each location features arcade games, amusement rides and musical shows in addition to serving pizza and other food items; former mainstays included ball pits, crawl tubes, and animatronic shows. The chain's name is taken from its main character and mascot, Chuck E. Cheese. The first location opened as Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre in San Jose, California. It was the first family restaurant to integrate food with arcade games and animated entertainment, thus being one of the pioneers for the "family entertainment center" concept.
The Cardiff Giant was one of the most famous archaeological hoaxes in American history. It was a 10-foot-tall (3.0 m), roughly 3,000 pound purported "petrified man", uncovered on October 16, 1869 by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. "Stub" Newell, in Cardiff, New York. He covered the giant with a tent and it soon became an attraction site. Both it and an unauthorized copy made by P. T. Barnum are still being displayed. P.T. Barnum's is on display at Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Animatronics is technology relating to the usage of electronics to animate puppets or other figures. They are a modern variant of the automaton and are often used for the portrayal of characters in films, video games and in theme park attractions.
The Rock-afire Explosion (RAE) is an animatronic character band designed and manufactured by Creative Engineering, Inc. (CEI) for use in ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants in the 1980s and early 1990s. The band's characters were various anthropomorphized animals, including a brown bear, a grey wolf and a silverback gorilla. They performed medleys of classic rock, pop, and country music, as well as original compositions and comedic skits.
Twelve Oaks Mall is a shopping mall with over 180 stores which is located in Novi, Michigan, United States, a suburb of Detroit. The mall features anchor stores JCPenney, Macy's, and Nordstrom, with two vacant anchors previously Lord & Taylor and Sears.
Bullwinkle's Entertainment, previously known as Family Fun Centers & Bullwinkle's Restaurant and formerly Bullwinkle's Family Food n' Fun is a chain of family entertainment centers. Locations feature a sit-down restaurant, complemented by arcade games, go-karts, bumper boats, mini golf, laser tag, a ropes course, a zip line, and small rides for children. Games and activities are generally themed around the company's namesake, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum is the debut studio album by American rock band Tally Hall, originally released on October 24, 2005. Their previous recordings were all independently produced and distributed demos. All of the tracks on the album are finished versions of their demo tracks featured in Complete Demos, with the exception of "Haiku," which is a completely new song. The album gets its name from a museum of mechanized curiosities that is located in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The album's cover art is also based on a number of machines located within the museum.
Space Race is an arcade game developed by Atari, Inc. and released on July 16, 1973. It was the second game by the company, after Pong (1972), which marked the beginning of the commercial video game industry along with the Magnavox Odyssey. In the game, two players each control a rocket ship, with the goal of being the first to move their ship from the bottom of the screen to the top. Along the way are asteroids, which the players must avoid. Space Race was the first racing arcade video game and the first game with a goal of crossing the screen while avoiding obstacles.
Tally Hall is an American rock band formed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in December 2002, and publicly active until the conclusion of their Good & Evil tour in 2011. The band is known for its upbeat melodies, whimsical lyrics, and a dedicated fanbase on social media sites. The members originally described their musical style as "wonky rock", later redefining their sound as "fabloo", to not let any particular genres define their music after critics began defining the characteristics of "wonky rock".
ShowBiz Pizza Place, or simply ShowBiz Pizza, was an American family entertainment center and restaurant pizza chain founded in 1980 by Robert L. Brock and Creative Engineering (CEI). It emerged after a separation between Brock and owners of the Chuck E. Cheese franchise, Pizza Time Theatre. ShowBiz Pizza restaurants entertained guests through a large selection of arcade games, coin-operated rides, and animatronic stage shows.
Buddy's Pizza is an independent pizza restaurant chain based in Detroit, Michigan. Founded in 1946, the company has an annual revenue of US $30 million. The chain's 23 restaurants have over 700 employees. Buddy's has been called one of the five best pizzerias in the United States by the Food Network. It has a bocce ball league that plays every Saturday morning at its original Conant Street location.
Pizza Showtime was a family restaurant and entertainment centre operating in Perth, Western Australia from 1980 to 1984. Similar to the American Chuck E. Cheese chain it was a sit down pizza restaurant complemented by arcade games, and animatronic characters.
The Detroit Dark Angels were a women's semi-professional American football team founded in 2010 by Chuck Lauber and Aaron Brothers. In 2014, the team was purchased and reorganized as a 501(c)3 corporation DDA Football Inc., by a group that included former Detroit Demolition players Alecia Sweeney and Yarlen Henry along with Coach Keith Thomas.
Aaron Fechter is an American mechanical engineer, entrepreneur, voice actor, singer, and musician who owns and operates Creative Engineering, Inc. (CEI). He is best known as the creator of The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronic show featuring a variety of characters created primarily for Showbiz Pizza Place restaurants throughout the 1980s. A fallout between Showbiz and CEI, along with the chain's dwindling revenue, led to the show's decline and eventual removal by the early 1990s.
The Detroit-based Caille Bros. Manufacturing Company along with Chicago-based Mills Novelty Company, were one of the most successful companies in the United States coin-operated machine industry during the 19th century and early 20th century. They became popular releasing not only slot machines, but grew the company to encompass arcade games, weight scales, strength testers, gum machines and Bagatelle-style games. They also produced a popular line of outboard motors. Once penny arcades began to decline Caille even built coin-operated "moving picture'' machines, sometimes called nickelodeons. Following the death of company President A. Arthur Caille in 1916, the company continued to release mainly trade simulators and gambling machines, but with little variety in their mechanical game output, were overtaken by newer players such as A.B.T, Erie Machine co., Chester Pollard and Exhibit Supply, eventually leading Adolph A. Caille, the surviving brother, to sell the business to Fuller Johnson in 1932.
"The Bidding" is a song by American rock band Tally Hall. It was released on October 24, 2005 as track 5 of Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. The song was written by Joe Hawley with vocals led by Hawley, Rob Cantor, and Zubin Sedghi. It received generally positive reception, amassing over 171 million streams on Spotify and 27 million plays on YouTube. In 2019, the song became a viral song on the social media platform TikTok, with many using the beginning verse and two ending verses as a sped-up soundbite on the site.
The discography of Tally Hall, an American rock band, consists of two studio albums, two compilation albums, five extended plays (EPs), six singles, one promotional single, nine music videos and five appearances on compilation and soundtrack albums or in video collections. The band was formed in 2002 while attending the University of Michigan. A year later, they recorded their debut EP, Party Boobytrap, followed by their second release, Welcome to Tally Hall, in 2004. The latter incorporated a larger spectrum of styles, and the two EPs were combined on the full-length Complete Demos the same year.
"Hidden in the Sand" is a song by American rock band Tally Hall. It appears as a hidden track on the band's debut album, Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. It has become one of the band's more recognized songs following their disbandment mainly to its spread on social media sites such as TikTok.
