Chuck E. Cheese to bring new Adventure World playground concept to Crest Hill, Illinois
The animatronic band that once defined Chuck E. Cheese may be a thing of the past in all but a few places these days, but the family entertainment center chain announced Tuesday that it is bringing a new indoor playground concept, called Adventure World, to Chicago's south suburbs.
Chuck E. Cheese announced that an Adventure World multilevel playground will open in 2027 in Crest Hill, Illinois. Adventure World locations will also open in 2027 in Flint, Michigan; Chesterfield, Missouri; Lakewood, Colorado; Los Angeles; and two other locations in California. Adventure Worlds will also open before the end of this year in various cities around the country.
The first Adventure World opened in November 2025 in Arlington, Texas,, and became one of the most successful openings in the nearly 50-year history of Chuck E. Cheese, the company said.
Adventure World locations will feature 12,000 to 18,000 square feet of play and exploration equipment, as well as dining and celebrations. Inside the play areas, kids will choose their own imaginative journeys through themed areas anchored by the characters older generations may remember as animatronics — Munch's Cosmic Bounce, Bella's Castle Quest, Jasper's Bubble Reef, and Chuck E.'s Jungle Temple.
The playgrounds are full of structures, slides, obstacles, and, in a throwback to the Chuck E. Cheese kids of the 1980s and 90s might remember, ball pits. The last time ball pits were featured as part of the Chuck E. Cheese experience was back in 2011.
The playground will also feature a toddler zone for younger kids, and a giant video wall with a digital live show. A Power Up Station features popcorn, nachos, pizza, and wings.
Admission covers all-day play for children, Chuck E. Cheese said.
"Families have told us they want a place where kids can move and use their imagination all day, with food and celebrations built right in," Randy Forsythe, president of Chuck E. Cheese, said in a news release. "That's exactly what we built. Now we get to share it with kids in a lot more cities."
Chuck E. Cheese was founded in 1977 by Atari's co-founder, Nolan Bushnell, with the first location opening as Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre in San Jose, California. It was the first family restaurant to marry food with arcade games and animated entertainment.
Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre arrived in Illinois in 1981, with a location in Loves Park near Rockford. A Chicago location opened a couple of years later at the Harlem-Foster Shopping Center, at 7300 W. Foster Ave. on the city's Northwest Side.
By contrast to today's brightly lit spaces, Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre back in the 1980s was composed of so many massive, dimly lit rooms with arcade games, mini-carnival rides, and Skee-Ball and Whac-A-Mole. But in a concept not so unlike the new Adventure World, there were also mazes with rope ladders to climb, as well as the aforementioned ball pits.
The Foster Avenue Chuck E. Cheese location featured three different rooms of animatronic musical acts. A main dining room featured the Pizza Time Players — Jasper T. Jowls, Helen Henny, Pasqually, Mr. Munch, and of course Chuck E. Cheese himself — who back then was depicted as a wisecracking rat with a New Jersey accent and attire that to some suggested a casino pit boss, rather than today's mouse in a skateboarder outfit. Other party rooms featured a band of dogs called "The Beagles," and a lion in a white and gold jumpsuit called "The King" — which mimed along to real recordings of The Beatles and Elvis Presley, respectively. A fourth animatronic act, jazz-singing hippo Dolli Dimples, was the first sight seen upon entering the amusement venue.
The animatronic entertainment remained a mainstay of Chuck E. Cheese locations even after the lights got brighter inside and the Chuck E. Cheese character changed rodent species. But in 2023, Chuck E. Cheese announced that it would be pulling the plug on the animatronic performances at all but what turned out to be a few locations — including one at the Town & Country Shopping Center at 2369 S. MacArthur Blvd. in Springfield. Illinois.
Chuck E. Cheese has 15 locations in the Chicago area, including one in Northwest Indiana. That old Foster Avenue location is not among the current ones — it became a Little Caesar's Caesarland later in the 1980s and is now a Planet Fitness gym.
