Portland will soon have one more thing Seattle doesn’t — a mega video game and pinball arcade set to open next spring.
According to Willamette Week, the new “steampunk video game palace” called Quarterworld is expected to open in the Alhambra Theatre in March. The 4,000-square-foot venue will be “almost twice the size” of another big arcade in town Ground Kontrol.
Quarterworld will house a pinball museum, arcade and bar. It is taking the place of the former music club on Southeast Hawthorne Blvd., which closed last June.
Quarterworld’s owner, Phil Ragaway, is the “unchallenged baron of Portland pinball,” according to Willamette Week, who also has a huge pinball machine collection waiting to be unleashed upon the world.
And in a 2016 twist, pinball enthusiasts will be able to pay for their old-school games with a Bluetooth app on their phones.
Love Ground Kontrol? Don’t worry. Ragaway assured Willamette Week that the businesses can coincide and serve different purposes:
“Ground Kontrol are friends of ours,” he told the Portland alt-weekly. “They’re like a little Ferrari. We’re more like a heavy industrial Cat. We’re like, a different kind of niche — kinda like how you can be mesmerized by shiny cool cars, but you can be equally mesmerized by cool heavy machinery. ‘I wanna drive that digger!’ It’s the same tools in the toolbox, but our tools are different.”
Ferrari or Cat, this is just another reason to make it down to Portland next year.
