By Zoe Kolenovsky, The Dallas Morning News
Everyone knows Chuck E. Cheese. For newly minted CEO Scott Drake, that’s been a blessing and a curse.
The Irving-based kids’ entertainment giant has an undeniably iconic brand identity. The eponymous mouse behind the pizza-and-arcade-games empire has been a household name for decades. And with 550,000 birthday parties a year, the company has a good reason to call itself the “birthday capital of America.”
But as Drake likes to say, “If you have not been in a Chuck E. Cheese in the last four years, you have no idea what today’s Chuck E. Cheese is.”
That’s because the company has been undergoing a total refresh. It’s invested millions in renovating its hundreds of U.S. locations, has implemented revamped pricing packages designed to meet families where they are, and is now testing a new store concept in North Texas that will soon be popping up at sites across the country.
These initiatives are all intended to maximize customer value, and Drake said the company has seen an incredible boost in sales as a result. It couldn’t have come at a better time.
Almost seven years ago, Chuck E. Cheese was in the hole. In its annual financial report for fiscal year 2019 (the last time one was filed publicly), Chuck E. Cheese’s parent company CEC Entertainment reported losses of $28 million.
The following year, the COVID-19 pandemic forced families to stay home, strangling revenues across industries that relied on in-person customers. The party powerhouse was hit hard. In June 2020, CEC Entertainment filed for bankruptcy.
Now, though, the entertainment mainstay is confident enough in its financial stability to be embarking on an ambitious expansion plan. So how’d they do it?
Not with a silver bullet solution, Drake will tell you. The answer boils down to a combination of using capital strategically, being open to new avenues for engaging customers and remaining committed to what the company already does best. The Dallas Morning News sat down with Drake to hear his version of the story.
Lay of the land
Drake’s time with CEC Entertainment began in 2024, when he accepted the chief financial officer job. In doing so, he tied himself to a business clawing its way out of a financial crisis.
Chuck E. Cheese’s fiscal woes trace back even further than its Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. It had been carrying a debt burden of close to $1 billion for years after private equity firm Apollo Global Management Inc. took CEC Entertainment private in a leveraged buyout. That debt, first reported at $998 million in the company’s annual financial filing for fiscal year 2014, had only diminished by $76 million five years later.
Drake was no stranger to tricky corporate finances. He’s been balancing the books at major players in the North Texas business scene for decades, having previously led financial planning teams at Farmer Brothers Coffee Co., GameStop and 7-Eleven.
“I’m usually that person. I’m coming in, and I’m restructuring,” Drake said. “I’m either peeling off parts that don’t make sense, I’m adding parts that could make sense, or I’m finding cost savings and avenues and all of that kind of creative destruction to save money or make operations better.”
But when he got to Chuck E. Cheese, he found that things were already running pretty smoothly.
A huge part of the company’s business is games — Drake says Chuck E. Cheese operates more video games than anyone in the world. And in almost 50 years, they’ve gotten good at it. There’s a technician based in almost every store to step in when games break down and minimize lost play time, keeping efficiency scores up.
Employees are also highly knowledgeable. When Drake was first getting acquainted with the business before taking the job, he visited several locations almost Undercover-Boss-style to get the lay of the land.
“The crazy thing to me was everyone knew everything,” he said of the Chuck E. Cheese employees he spoke to. “I realized their tenure is kind of unheard of in the retail space.”
On average, Chuck E. Cheese employees have been with the company between 14 and 19 years — far outside of the norm in an industry known for high turnover.
Drake came away from his backgrounding with the impression that Chuck E. Cheese’s workforce was talented, tenured and efficient. He also felt that the leadership team was incredibly strong.
Before Drake assumed the CEO role in February 2026, the job was held by David McKillips, who came with experience building new membership programs at Six Flags and now heads the team at Dallas-based Topgolf. He was brought in at the start of 2020 and led the company through its bankruptcy that summer and subsequent restructuring in the winter. Ownership of CEC Entertainment was transferred to its creditors — a group of investment firms led by Monarch Alternative Capital — in December 2020, and over $700 million of its debt was eliminated.
McKillips’ passion for the brand was palpable to Drake, as was his level-headed assessment of where Chuck E. Cheese needed to grow if it wanted to survive. Other members of the executive team like Melissa McLeanas, who joined in 2020 to head up CEC Entertainment’s media strategy, and Mario Centola, who came on in 2022 to lead international licensing, added to Drake’s impression that the company was in good hands.
All in all, Chuck E. Cheese was presenting a foundation that Drake could work with. But it also meant he had to get creative if he wanted to shore things up even further.
The game plan
Chuck E. Cheese’s executives had a plan.
Step one was to revamp the brand. As Drake put it, “We’ve got to fix the box before we invite people in.”
The company spent $350 million on revamping all its U.S. stores — an investment that was made possible by the debt restructuring in 2020.
Much of the focus was on modernizing operations. They did away with physical tickets that kids have to keep track of after they win a game, digitizing the process with Play Passes and Play Bands. They also built large video walls in every store to stream kid-friendly content alongside an interactive dance floor, making it easier for the team to craft narratives around a certain party theme or update decor for holiday seasons, while opening an opportunity for partnerships with brands like Kidz Bop and the Harlem Globetrotters.
Step two was to drive traffic. As a self-proclaimed “numbers guy,” Drake turned to the data for answers.
Throughout the company’s history, customers have tended to visit a Chuck E. Cheese location once or twice a year, on average. Drake immediately saw that building the frequency of those visits would be “an enormous financial unlock.”
In 2024, the company rolled out new membership models to incentivize families to come more often. They relaunched a revamped summer fun pass, which now gets families two months of unlimited gameplay and visits plus discounted food for $54.99.
Previously, the most passes Chuck E. Cheese had ever sold in a year was 75,000. In 2024, they sold over 400,000. Folks are now coming in between 14 and 18 times a year, on average.
They also rolled out a monthly membership, which gets families unlimited visits and other perks starting at $7.99 a month. It was part of an intentional play by the company to make Chuck E. Cheese experiences more affordable and thus more accessible to a wider customer base.
Drake noted that the company’s traditional customer makes less than $100,000 a year — a cohort that has had less wiggle room in their wallets lately as the rising cost of living eats away at their disposable income. So, Chuck E. Cheese has leaned into being “the treat down the street.”
“Normally they would go to the beach for the weekend, or they would go to an amusement park for a few days. They’re like, ‘Hey, we can’t get away and spend those bigger amounts of money, but we want to go do something for the kids,’ ” Drake said. “Chuck E. becomes that getaway.”
Looking for ways to still bring value to customers who are feeling the strain of tighter budgets has been a winning strategy for Chuck E. Cheese.
The company added a $99.99 birthday party option in 2024, which has helped them maintain positive sales in nearly all of the past 30 months while competitors in the restaurant and family entertainment industries have struggled.
Expanding on past successes
Value means more to Chuck E. Cheese than just the financials. As part of Drake’s favored “test-and-learn” approach to new ventures, the company experimented with a push into the “active play” space to see whether customers would buy in.
The idea was to move beyond the pizza-and-arcade model families are familiar with and implement more physical activities for kids. It started in the aftermath of the pandemic, when parents were worried about how much screen time their kids were getting.
“We knew they really wanted to get out of the house and have fun in a safe environment,” Drake said.
Older Chuck E. Cheese fans may remember that the stores used to have ball pits and climbing structures called sky tubes, which got kids moving. Now, the team thought it was time to bring some of those elements back and “get back to our roots.”
They began adding mini bounce pads to their stores, designed to be a more accessible version for younger kids than the big trampoline parks that aren’t always toddler-friendly. The response was resounding.
“Every time we put one in a store, it increased store sales somewhere between 6, 7 [and] 8 percent,” Drake said. “It was just a big success everywhere.”
Chuck E. Cheese then rolled out Superhero Playgrounds — indoor obstacle courses that combine elements like balance beams, rope challenges and trampolines into multi-story climbing structures. Those did well too.
Now, the company is supersizing the model with its new Adventure Worlds. These are new locations designed almost entirely around the obstacle course model — three-level structures that add elements like soccer zones and slides. They also include a few arcade games, keeping with Chuck E. Cheese tradition.
The first one launched in Arlington in 2025. Drake joked that it was “probably the worst location” they could have chosen — it’s not the easiest spot to get to, and basically “every competitor in the world” has outposts within a mile-and-a-half radius. One of the top-five most popular Chuck E. Cheese locations is just two exits away, something the company usually tries to avoid.
None of that ended up being a problem.
“It blew the doors off,” Drake said.
What’s next?
As Chuck E. Cheese marks its 50th anniversary next year, a major birthday for the birthday giant itself, the fun is far from over.
Adventure World is at the top of the agenda; the company is unleashing the concept across the country. Drake expects to open five or six more by January 2027.
Chandler, Arizona, will get one in September, and Fargo, North Dakota, is slated for an October opening. Rochester, New York, Houston and Los Angeles are also on the list, alongside North Texas’ second location in Plano, where construction is scheduled to conclude in December.
CEC Entertainment continues to look for new niches they can enter and add value — supporting Drake’s mission to find growth wherever he can.
Drake has explored partnerships with malls and resorts to open gaming centers for older audiences known as “Chuck’s Arcades.” He said sales at the pilot locations in malls went up 30 to 40%, but there weren’t enough shopping centers with high enough traffic to justify a bigger expansion. At the resorts, though, the margins worked out nicely, Drake said. Test and learn.
The company is also leaning into its burgeoning media arm. It launched the CEC Media Network in May 2025, which Drake said got 2 billion impressions in its first year. Chuck E. also scored his first feature film last November: a holiday special that premiered on Prime Video.
As the company’s reimagination continues to take shape, its short-term profile is on stronger footing than a decade ago.
“It’s a very healthy business just as it sits,” Drake said.
One thing you can count on Chuck E. Cheese not to change? The pizza.
The company has its own proprietary blend of dough, sauce and cheese customers know and love. Ever the numbers guy, Drake laid old rumors about whether the company recycled customers’ discarded scraps into “Franken-pizzas” to rest in his conversation with The News.
“It’s totally false,” he said. “We’re very particular about it. There are handmade, gourmet pizzas in every location of Chuck E. Cheese.”
“There is no reason to recycle them,” Drake added. “The margin on pizza is very good.”
©2026 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.