Collect, Track, and Invest in Chuck E. Cheese Tokens

My story starts in 2014 when I backed The Vertical Coin Bank on Kickstarter. A few years later, I read about Chuck E. Cheese switching from tokens to the Play Pass . While I hadn't been to Chuck E. Cheese since I was a kid, my millennial urge to preserve 90s nostalgia drove me to swap my coins for tokens! That first purchase spiraled into an obsession...

It was approximately one day after I got married when I decided to expand my Chuck E. Cheese token collection. I started with bulk lots of a few hundred at a time for $0.25 per token. I enjoyed the thrill of searching for rare tokens (sort of like ripping packs of Pokemon cards). I even found a 1977 vintage token I later resold for $450. Soon I was buying thousands at a time.

Eventually my bulk sales were yielding fewer new tokens for my collection so I had to get more creative to find the rare tokens from international locations, employee-only tokens (the silver and black colored ones), and city tokens from the 80s. After stalking old forums I got in touch with the person who wrote the first Chuck E. Cheese token collectors guide and bought his full collection (thank you again, Joe!).

I started selling my duplicate Chuck E. Cheese tokens on eBay in order to justify spending thousands of dollars on tokens I was missing from my collection. Even so, nearly every dollar the store brings in gets recycled right back into tokens I'm still missing, so despite thousands in sales I have far more invested in the collection than I've ever taken out.

While there are other guides out there, I built cectoken.com to do more than catalog what exists. It's a place to track your own collection, follow real price history from actual sales, and see a fair value estimate for any token at a glance. My hope is that making all of that easy to access brings more people into the hobby, because the bigger the community gets, the more tokens resurface and the more of this 90s nostalgia we preserve.