Chuck's Arcade opens in St. Pete, 1 of 10 in the country
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla - Xoe Smith and her mom, Denise Smith, beat the heat on Monday by playing endless games of air hockey at Chuck’s Arcade inside the Tyrone Square Mall in St. Pete.
"I don’t think the original one had that, so it’s kind of nice that they had some more mature stuff," Denise said about air hockey. "It’s absolutely a grown-up Chuck E. Cheese. I think it’s less chaotic without the ball pits and everything," she said.
In late June, Fun Spot Arcade, which opened in January, was rebranded into one of just 10 Chuck’s Arcades in the country. It’s a spinoff of Chuck E. Cheese.
"We chose this location because we feel like there's a really big audience of not just younger people, but older folks as well that really enjoy just the general liveliness of this area," Owen Stewart, a general store associate at the St. Pete location, said. "There's a lot of people that really missed having an arcade in this kind of space," he said.
The arcade has more than 40 games, old and new, like a virtual reality game.
What they're saying:
"While we still want to have a younger audience as well, we also want to make sure that the people growing up with Chuck E. Cheese still know that we enjoy having them here as well. We've added a few retro games, like Donkey Kong and Asteroids, all those kinds of games just to make sure that our older folks as well enjoy coming here," Stewart said.
You load money onto a game card and tap to play instead of using tokens. As far as prizes go, this location only has prizes in the claw machine games.
"We're just games. You just come in and you play all the games that you want," Stewart said.
They also don’t serve food or drinks right now.
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One of the animatronic characters, Pasqually, is on display.
"He doesn't sing or dance or anything, but we feel it's good to have just a little piece of the actual Chuck E. Cheese store in here to make sure people know where we came from," Stewart said.
The location in Tyrone Square Mall is open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
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The Source: FOX 13’s Kailey Tracy talked with Owen Stewart, a general store associate at the St. Pete location of Chuck’s Arcade, for this story.