About Cheese-E-Pedia
Cheese-E-Pedia is a MediaWiki information hub for documenting and archiving the vast histories of Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre, Showbiz Pizza Place, Chuck E. Cheese's, and Creative Engineering- while we also are beginning to cover other smaller animatronic companies.
We also have a complementary Discord community for collaborating on articles, alongside discussing the companies and their animatronics.
About Us
Mission Statement
Cheese-E-Pedia's goal is to archive everything that has happened in the 40+ year timespan of every major FEC animatronics company. No topic, item, or idea will be left undocumented, and every piece of data in the public's hands will be preserved and archived. Every item also deserves its own page to allow community members to delve into a topic as much as they would like, promoting community involvement from the wide range of enthusiasts and fans.
When did Cheese-E-Pedia begin?
The site launched to private access in November of 2021, where 7 community members would spend the next eight months building the infrastructure of the site. They would discuss the layout of categories, create articles, build standards and formats for articles, and begin to gather exclusive and thoroughly researched information for the legitimization of the site.
On July 10th, 2022, the site would be announced in the Cheese-E-Pedia Discord Server (Then called Pizza Time Techs), set to release the next week. The actual release would arrive early on July 14th, launching without issue.
History of CEC Information
The start of the Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza Place fandom would begin in the late 90's, with the keystone of the fandom being showbizpizza.com and its host, Travis Schafer. This site would begin as a general hub for pictures and info, but would grow into the main historical documentation hub for all things CEC and SPP.
In 2000, the owner of spp.com would then open showbizpizzaforum.com, a place for the fandom to congregate and discuss. Lots of threads slowly piecing together the history of the company, alongside trading and sharing lost media, would occur throughout the forum, later being documented on the main spp.com website. This would continue into the early 2010's as the fandom grew, before being cut short in November 2014, where adware would infect the host forum and render the site useless. The forum would be shut down and never brought back online.
Around the same time, work on the spp.com site would slow down, with new documents, articles, videos, and other related media stopped being archived. Major items and breakthroughs would still appear throughout the years, mainly in 2015, 2017, and 2018, but work on general pages and documentation of the company's current work would stop altogether. Due to the site's owner being the only one with access to write pages for the site, none of the community was able to contribute further when the owner did not have the time to.
Just a month before the forum's demise, however, a new forum was created on the Zetaboards platform called Retro Pizza Zone. All the fandom members would flock to the new site, leaving the old forums without any proper archive. Discussion and growth would continue as usual, with lots of threads being made on a variety of historical topics.
Just two years later though many major members of the boards would leave for Instagram, beginning the decline of the forum alongside general lack of interest in the fandom after disappointing events from the Chuck E. Cheese company themselves. Similar to the old forums, however, the new forum would also be hit with an immediate change that would ruin its appeal altogether in July 2018. Zetaboards would merge with the site Tapatalk, turning all old forums into an ad-ridden, slower, and more bloated UI. This would dispel members to social media sites and messenger apps, mainly Instagram and Discord.
Due to the lack of a dedicated forum, little progress being made on the info site, and a sharp decline in the interest of the company's current output, a centralized place for documentation of historical info wouldn't be anywhere for enthusiastic members to go to. Most info would instead be shared amongst users in group chats and social media, leaving critical pieces scattered amongst the internet and in private discussions.
Cheese-E-Pedia is now the new centralized place for community members to begin documenting years of info that was held stagnant due to many circumstances, alongside allowing categories for archiving new information previously unexplored. The open nature of the platform should also ensure that any member of the community can contribute to information, getting areas done faster and allowing enthusiasts to write about their niche no matter the outward circumstances of the fandom and its general interest.
Previous sites and forums however are still great resources for citing sources, reading, and finding topics yet to be detailed on the wiki. It would not be without the previous 20 years of hard work that the current community would be existing and thriving in archived content.