NEW YORK—Prices for the obsolete game tokens of U.S.-based family entertainment center/restaurant pizza chain Chuck E. Cheese continue to skyrocket, vastly outpacing even surging cryptocurrencies bitcoin and dogecoin.
With a face value of just 25 cents, the tokens date back to the late 1970s. The company phased them out in 2016, switching to a card that made it easier to track individual customer’s rewards—and thus collect customer information. It was for that very reason that Dean R. Coyne, a NYC-based currency trader, began hoarding them five years ago: He believed the tokens were great stores of value, and he didn’t think the government could or would legitimately be able to regulate them.
With nearly 550 Chuck E. Cheese locations across the United States, Canada, Guam, and Puerto Rico, the tokens clearly have an established presence in the world’s four biggest economies. Although none of those locations officially accepts the tokens any longer, Coyne notes that employees and customers who are “forward thinking” gladly trade them for pizzas, drinks, and other commodities. He likens this exchange system to the decentralized finance that cryptocurrencies promise but have yet to fully deliver. He adds that the cashless world that speculators in bitcoins and altcoins hype as the future of money was already predicted by the Chuck E. Cheese tokens, many of which include the words “no cash value.” With the smile of a child who’s just figured out how to score high every time in Skee-Ball, he insists the tokens were Chuck E. Cheese founder (and Atari co-founder) Nolan Bushnell’s middle finger to the central banks, including the Federal Reserve.
Lisa Cellier, a Paris-based currency analyst, says she thinks the sky’s the limit for the tokens and that if she had to choose between dogecoin and the tokens, she’d be literally filling bank bags with the latter. Part of her argument is purely objective: Dogecoin currently has a supply of more than 131 billion coins while, by her estimates, “there’s way less than a billion Chuck E. Cheese tokens in existence.” That relative scarcity, combined with the absolute rarity of some of the older tokens dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, should keep demand very strong.
The other part of her argument is more subjective: She finds Chuck E. Cheese, the gregarious singing and dancing rat mascot far cuter and more cuddly than the rather ambiguous Shiba Inu dog that appears virtually lifeless on dogecoin, and she thinks that will also make the tokens more valuable. Plus, she observes, you can always melt the quarter-sized tokens down for scrap metal or, if the world came to an end, stick them in a sock to use for self-defense. “You can’t do that with crypto,” she concluded.
Currency trader Coyne also thinks dogecoin doesn’t have a future. After, all, he says, it literally started as a joke in 2013 by its creators Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. On the other hand, Chuck E. Cheese tokens, he says, “were the reserve currency for arcade fun for nearly four decades for many children and adults. Many of the tokens state ‘In pizza we trust.’ And who doesn’t trust pizza served by a huge adorable rat?”
