Classic Childhood Photo of Chuck E. Cheese Arcade Room

Posted February 13, 2008

Late November last year I got an awesome surprise. My sister had sent me some 900 scanned slides of photos my parents had taken of our childhood years. The idea was, I was supposed to put the slides in a “slideshow” with music and burn them to a DVD and this would be our Christmas gift to our parents this year. Great idea! They’ll cry for sure:)

However, all of the slides had some level of dust on them so I had to go through and touch up each and every one of them. Knowing how much work that would be, my sister and I went through them one by one to weed out any photos that were just so bad that they weren’t worth including and saving me some touch up time.

I was so excited when I found a photo of me, as a child, on some sort of Merry Go Round in a Chuck E. Cheese (on the left looking worried). In the background you can see a beautifully pink Ms. Pac-man, and some other machine. (I had posted on the forums to find out the identity of the arcade game, and within minutes, another collector identified the blurred machine as a Bosconian.)

Jeff Rothe in Chuck E. Cheese with Ms. Pac-man and Bosconian

“This would make an awesome Rotheblog post!”, I thought. How more original could this be? A vintage arcade photo now digitally preserved. Oh wait, my mom occasionally reads this thing, and the slide present is supposed to be a surprise. If I post this, she’ll wonder how I even got this photo.

So, I waited to post my Chuck E. Cheese arcade photo, and I almost completely forgot about it. Until I rediscovered the Chuck E. Cheese photo today.

Little did I know. As I sat on that frightening molded horsie that someday I would own a Ms. Pac-man machine and yearn for a time when all I had to worry about was whether my sister could actually catch me riding that plastic frog.