Reel to Real

Reel to Real was an unofficial open-source animatronic simulator game that succeeded the prior Rock-afire Replay , focusing on Chuck E. Cheese animatronics, that lasted from July 24, 2022 to December 9th, 2022- where it received a Cease & Desist from CEC Entertainment.

History

Pivot From Replay

Reel to Real started as the Rock-afire Explosion simulator Rock-afire Replay , developed from August 24, 2020 to January 5th, 2021, where it was publicly removed after pressures from Creative Engineering. It would continue development in private, alongside a side-game using the same codebase publically released as the Five Nights at Freddy's fangame 'Faz-Anim', throughout 2021 and 2022.
In late 2021 plans were made to strip out Creative Engineering characters even from the private build as to not stir the company if anything were to leak. This also shifted the development into exclusively working on Chuck E. Cheese and Pizza Time Theatre related characters, as at the time CEC had not interacted with its fan community in almost a decade, making it seem to be the safer option for a fan-release. Replay already included a single set of Cyberamics from one of its last updates, and its base Rock-afire mechs could be repurposed into the 3-Stage characters, just as it had been done during Concept Unification . Creative Engineering also suggested multiple times for Replay to be repurposed into either a CEC or FNaF simulator, which it eventually had become both. The removal of CEI assets would come on September 10th, 2021.

Rename

During Replay's private development it went under the name "Pizza Time Player", with the tagline "Vintage Animatronic Program Emulator". On December 5, 2021, the testing group suggested multiple new names to potentially rename the software. These were "Rat Reels", "Virtual Reels", "Rat Replay", "Pizza Player", "Pizza Time Theater", "Vintage Tape Theatre", "Robotic Animation Emulator", "Cheese Tapes Virtualized", "Animatronic Tapes Virtualized", "Robot Replay", "Replay Resurrection", "Animatronic Archive", "Robot Reanimator", and "Project Cheese", before suddenly coming to Reel to Real with unanimous approval.

Early Teasers

The first teasers of Reel to Real would come on December 10th, 2021 in the Pizza Time Techs Discord server (Now the Cheese-E-Pedia server), first in the form of a darkened screenshot of a fully finished Cyberamic Chuck with the game's new logo. After discussion and excitement developed over the image, a second teaser showing a clearer view released. The following day a video showing the Warblettes playing official Pizza Time Theatre data was shown, though it was not known at the time it wasn't fan-programmed.