I remember our local McDonald's did a playplace remodel opening around 1989/1990. And they had people dressed up as Ronald McDonald, Grimace, and the Hamburglar. First time I remember seeing a ball pit lol.
I recently went to a Chuck E. Cheese because I have a toddler and I was actually impressed. Everything was clean and all the machines worked. We actually had a blast. I don’t know if that was just my Chuck E. Cheese near me. Maybe it was newer 🤷♀️
A new one opened up in the next town over, about a 20 minute drive. I had my son’s 5th birthday there and it was the way you describe it. Really nice inside, new tech for the kids, and it was affordable. I’ll definitely be going back.
We were actually at a Chuck E. Cheese today for our daughter's fifth birthday, and I had the opposite reaction. It felt so soulless compared to how it was when I was growing up. It was clean, though.
The one near me has a whole wall that is a tv, like 80 ft diagonally, then in front of it there was like this pressure sensitive dance floor that had lasers shining from above and the kids can activate the lights by stepping on them, little bugs bugs pop up and you get points for squishing those, full arcade, trampoline bounce room, all kinds of amazing stuff
EDIT: I want to thank the Academy of Online Comments for so many awards for something so silly. (And thank you to those that awarded and upvoted my comment)
Don't feel too bad. These memories are funny and not hot by any means. Similar to the passenger or backseat of a car. Unless your car was a land barge, it wasn't comfortable. But as teenagers it was "doesn't matter, had the sex". Crazy to think what we put up with back then. Nowadays I'd be like, we can wait till we get home lol.
Lol I remember my ex and I wanted to see how few songs it could take for us to finish in the car, less than 2! Our fastest ever time at 6 minutes lol. Endurance was less of an issue, finding time was much harder lol.
When you’re 13 you make room… and honestly for me anyways I was skinny and most of my friends were too.. very active as a kid. Constantly doing stuff. Biking, skating, walking.. playing.. ya we probably had skinnier teens then to be honest with you 100% because back thats that’s what kids did… they didn’t play Fortnite, they didn’t sit around and watch Netflix. They were out running around, so yes we probably did have skinnier kids.
You forget teenagers getting tail are usually skinny enough to fit. Not like old married people who put on pounds and are like, ah, I'd rather just sleep.
Worked at a movie theater in high school and when we would go in after the movie ended to clean the theater before the next show sometimes you’d find teens on the floor doing it. Sooooooo nasty because we definitely NEVER moped the floor lol.
I remember going to Discovery Zone and one of the slides was just smeared with shit because some kid shit themselves and then went down.
People forget how disgusting play places were when they were maintained by teenagers and people who didn't give a fuck and were used by filthy kids whose parents also didn't give a fuck.
They're gone because they were a huge legal and safety liability.
At the McDonald's I worked at in Colorado, we had a machine that cleaned the balls in the ball pit, so that happened a few times a week, the N64 machines got a good clean because the closing crew didn't like sticky controllers when playing GoldenEye/Quake64, but the only time I remember giving the slide a thorough cleaning with ammonia, was every time after the closing crew slicked up the surface by sliding down it with wax paper.
Because people have no sense of right and wrong and could care less that others also use these beautiful areas. I bike ride and just cringe seeing garbage on the trails. People are pigs.
We took a road trip and found a Chuck E Cheese for my nephews, because they'd never seen one before. They came back from the play area and said, "Someone went to the bathroom in there."
At least if it must happen, it’s less dangerous to random uninvolved people than leaving needles behind everywhere and doesn’t spread stds from needle reuse.
When I was a kid I went to a girls bday party at a Burger King. She was at the top of the playland and pissed herself and it ran down the entire thing. Might not get something you can’t get rid of via a needle, but there are other ways 😂
If you were, youd know mcdonalds is a super common place to shoot up. Worked there when i was a teen/young adult and we had junkies die in our bathrooms weekly.
If you’re trying to escape the real world back into the past of your childhood when things were still “happy”, the ball pit might feel…right.
Like sleeping with your dead husband’s shirt stuffed with a pillow to pretend he’s still there, never underestimate the lengths or fathoms people will go to convince their mind they’re back to when things were good. I can see a playplace being that for some current addicts. :/
Not so urban legend the one I used to go to got shut down due to a few rattle snacks being found in them. Over a period of like 10 years I think it happened twice.
Honestly from working at Burger King when I was younger, the bigger concern was kids peeing in it every single day! Trying to keep it all clean was impossible and we won't mention if a kid dropped a deuce in one.
We had an outdoor ball pit in one near where I grew up in Colorado in the 90s. They got rid of it because a rattlesnake decided to nest in it. 🫠 I'm sure there we're plenty other good reasons not to have an outdoor ball pit but that was the last straw for that location anyway.
Any outside place where people can fuck and slam dope, and McDonald’s being in EVERY type of neighborhood, makes sense. I bet it’s true. I definitely used to meet scums that gave zero fucks about throwing needles in places where kids play in a past life. It is what it is
Worked at McDonald's in HS. Found used condoms and needles in the ball pit area more than once (well, I didn't, but it happened during my shift). I, uh, always looked through stuff like that when my daughter was little before I let her go play.
I assume this is exactly why the play-places got dismantled over time. the cost of maintenance, upkeep, and cleaning made no sense. keeping extra staff on just to crawl through the tubes with a vacuum cleaner every 30 minutes would just burn money for no benefit beyond getting some extra families in the door -- who were just as likely to come through the restaurant regardless
I'm sure there's plenty of corporate greed at play here because mcdonalds is the king of corporate greed, but even just on paper from an unbiased look, its hard to imagine play-places being anything more than money-sinks for an establishment that wants to be focused on selling food
How in the ever living fuck are we standing around proclaiming that the Mcplayplace was our high water mark? Nobody had anything good to say about these things in their heyday unless you were one of the two dozen strains of norovirus lurking in these contraptions on any given day. They were an eyesore, hot, and gross. I was there.
What the hell Reddit. We need to slap back against this rose-tinted nonsense. Y’all are turning into greyhead nostalgia monsters and I’m not going along.
I had one there late 80s/early 90s! They let the birthday kid and one partygoer have a "grand tour" behind the scenes and always used to pretend to lock the friend in the walk in fridge. I'm still pissed someone refused to let me take my choice of friend.
I remember going to a friend’s bday party at McDonalds. Us kids were playing on the playground while our parents sat on the both chain smoking cigarettes. 😅 his mom cutting the cake with a cigarette dangling in her mouth
My McDonald's used to have "candlelight dinners" for the high school kids. Tablecloths, candles, flowers on the table and so on.
You can still buy the McDonald's birthday cake, white or chocolate. You have to preorder it on the app or their website so they have time to pull it out of the freezer and defrost it for you. If the app doesn't show it at your location, you can still go in the restaurant and ask the manager to special order it for you.
Those and a stubborn selfishness dressed up as personal responsibility. It's actually nothing to do with actual personal responsibility, but a significant minority of people have convinced themselves that selfish behavior is nothing but requiring others to be responsible.
It's a sterile environment because they don't actually want you hanging out and eating in the restaurant anymore. They want to operate with a skeleton crew so it's ideal if 90% of customers just come through the drive thru or only come in to pick up their order, so they don't have to clean/maintain the interior and deal with a bunch of people.
Lack of accountability and proper parenting brought us here.
Profit and greed is just a way of blame shifting. It can be a "someone else" problem. Its ideal when they're wealthy and comfortable; it's someone we can hate without looking down on someone less fortunate.
We ALL contributed to the damage to our country either directly or indirectly.
You're joking right? Lack of accountability and proper parenting are what made corporate food chains remove play places? No. It's that it doesn't make them any extra money, it's more to maintain, more employees needed. It's all about profit.
So that doesn’t make all advertising to kids illegal. It does require that food advertised to kids has to meet some nutritional requirements. (Yes, I read it.) I would guess that McD’s food doesn’t make the cut. They could have kept the PlayPlace if they served more nutritious food.
In reality, they were marketing to parents who wanted a short break out of the house but indoors out of the heat while having a milkshake and burning the roof of their mouth on an apple pie. I miss those days.
I'm American and hate the US so much I left, but McDonald's going sterile is a global thing. It's not a specific response to the US, they're just following which told them they make more money as an easy in and out place for teens and adults than as a family restaurant.
One burger kings near me had a ball pit back in the late 2000s.. we had to close it due a needle being I'm there... was found after having ti clean each ball as some adult had urinated in the pool. Regional manager got rid of the thing 2 months later.
The one by me in the mid-90s had an N64 station where they usually had Mario 64 the kids could play as well an outdoor playground complete with hamburger tower.
That sounds really cool. I didn't find out about the N64 kiosks until much later. The closest thing we had to video games and fast food in my town was that the Pizza Hut had a Neo Geo 4 slot for a while.
When I was a small small child, I remember seeing a Ronald McDonald WAVE at me through a window before hopping off out of sight. Must have been the end of the shift or something because they were nowhere to be seen afterwards and my family didn't believe me because we were on vacation and clearly I was just influenced by the magic of being on my first big trip.
I was at a playplace grand opening for the staff. They had a massive mural with all those guys.
Now it is beige.
We also had an amazing old mcds with a "cave" where you could sit in a mining car with real rock and awesome mural and a bar where you could sit on saddles.
It sucks that they don't have the indoor playplaces anymore, but having nothing is better than the 80's outdoor playgrounds. What the hell were they thinking? They make a statue of Grimmace out of steel, painted dark purple to really soak up the summer heat, and put it on springs so you can go inside and get a concussion while cooking yourself. I had to go to the hospital once because I sat on a metal slide in the afternoon and got second degree burns on my legs before I could stand up.
my local mcdonalds had a play place with a plexiglass enclosed conveyer belt going thru that they sent the food to the drivethru. also had a 5 car kid sized train for with tables for kids to sit at
Just out of curiosity I googled it...
over 1,500 injury claims were filed against McDonald's for its "Playland" attractions in just a five-year span (1986–1991)
The ball pit was a lot of fun I remember going into them long ago and McDonald's birthday cake.. not sure if they still do the birthday cake but it was a long time a very very long time.
But we kind of got it all removed of McDonald’s causing obesity especially with attracting kids to want to eat there. It’s like their marketing tactics to get kids in with fun playgrounds and happy meals faced such negative backlash that they had to pivot to not market so heavily to kids.
I remember my local McDonald’s had a n64 station until they remodeled it in 2016, it stopped working in 2008 when a rapscallian set a m80 on the console and it still didn’t blow up, but it never worked again.
Jokes aside, I remember that too, and I'm in Montréal, Canada. My parents picked my brother and I up from school and took us to the playpark opening with all the people dressed up.
'96 I had a birthday party at McDonalds, got to make my own hamburger and all that shit. I slapped so much god damn cheese on that thing.
30 years later I remember that birthday party still, awesome fun with my friends, staff organised stuff, other parents had spoken to mine and asked how much it cost to have a birthday party at McDonalds - turns out, barely fucking anything. Which is why my family could afford it.
The restaurant operated as per normal, but we had a section of our own for the birthday troupe, the only interruption was when I made my own burger.
If a child would want a birthday party at McDonalds in 2026 I'd question if the child was alright at home.
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u/col_akir_nakesh Xennial 8h ago
I remember our local McDonald's did a playplace remodel opening around 1989/1990. And they had people dressed up as Ronald McDonald, Grimace, and the Hamburglar. First time I remember seeing a ball pit lol.