Little known fact, the idea came to Bushnell when he was still running Atari. He was waiting for pizza and realized these bored people would pay to pay games while waiting. [1]

Bushnell was frustrated that Atari only got money on the original sale of a coin-op machine, while the operators got continuous revenue from the machine. He figured Atari could get in on the operations game by running a restaurant.

Atari built/ran the first Chuck E Cheese and Atari engineers (and Atari think tank Cyan Engineering) designed the robots. Restaurant opening was private for Atari staff.

The mascot was originally going to be called Rick Rat, until marketing suggested that associating a rat with the restaurant wasn't the best idea.

When Warner Communications bought out Atari, they didn't understand it or want it, so Bushnell bought it out from them and continued running it.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40425172/robots-pizza-and-magic-...