When we first moved to Old Town/Chinatown, we had more space than we had games.  But we kept finding classics we had to have, and as we added to our collection, the arcade floor got more and more crowded.  With that in mind, we started exploring how we could expand GK while staying in the same location.

After a lot of work, we came up with a plan we like.  The only problem was, it cost more money than we had.  That is, until we won Stride Gum’s “Save the Arcades” contest!  Since we promised to spend the prize money on an expansion, now seems like a good time to take the wraps off our plans and show them to the public.

Below are some stills from a 3d model I built using Google Sketchup.  They represent what we’d like to do.  Our plans are bound to change in various ways as they become reality, so stick with us and we’re sure you’ll be happy with the final results!

Click pictures to magnify.

This is the view from the front door.  You’ll notice that the second floor mezzanine has been extended to the front of the building.  There’s also a new wall and door leading to the new kitchen area, with a place of honor for our Dig-Dug stained glass.  We’re hoping to leave the central area open, to make it easier to get to the bar on busy nights.

Sitting at the bar, looking at the new seating area.  We’ve never been happy with our seating on the “stage”, and hope the bench seating will be a huge improvement.

Don’t worry, Rock Band fans – we’ll have a mini-stage that we can setup for Rock Band Tuesdays, with lots more seating for the audience.

This is the main driving row, relocated to where the stage currently is.

A view of the east arcade, reoriented to have wider aisles.  No more getting cut off from the bathroom by two big dudes on stools sitting back-to-back!

Another view of the east arcade.

The new Shooters’  Alley, featuring more gun games.

We’ve never been happy with our restrooms, so we’re hoping to make them better by remodeling them.  We’re thinking about using tile with black grout to discourage taggers and provide a canvas for some pixelated video game artwork.

Walking up the curved stairway. There’s a new curved wall on the left, and the DJ booth is still on the right.

Moving upstairs, here’s the view from the top of the stairs.  We’re taking out the wall that’s currently there to create a more open space.  You may notice a few pins that aren’t in our current lineup – we haven’t bought them yet, but they’re on our wish list!

All the fighting games are grouped together, with more space between them.

Looking at the new space on the east side of the mezzanine.  I’m sorry that most of the cabinets are generic – we haven’t had time to go into our storage unit to measure them yet..

Here’s the southeast end of the mezzanine, featuring DDR, the return of Gauntlet II, and more sit-down drivers.

Back at the top of the curved stairs, there will be an upstairs seating area.

The seats will afford a good overview of the arcade.

This side of the west mezzanine will be much as it is now. The far side is all new space.

The view from the southwest corner of the mezzanine. That’s a lot of pinball!

We hope you’ve enjoyed the tour! And we hope that you’ll be able to experience something similar at Ground Kontrol in the not-too-distant future! If you have any suggestions or comments, we’d love to hear from you!

PS Thank you, Isaac, for building the game models!

- Posted by The CEO

Now that we’ve defeated the boss at the end of level 2009, it’s time to advance to level 2010. But first, a look back at some of last year’s highlights:

January
Our first “new” game of 2009 was Taito’s 1986 classic, Bubble Bobble. We also hosted our first wedding!

February
This month saw the 3rd installment of our Slugfest fighting tournament. We also upgraded our Mortal Kombat II to a dedicated Midway cabinet with a 25″ CRT.

March
In March we debuted our custom Multi-Capcom cabinet, adding Aliens vs Predator and Vampire Savior to our collection.

April
We had our first Portland Pinbrawl pinball tournament, with 121 contestants. We also added our Namco Classic Collection multigame with Dig-Dug, Pac-Man, Galaga, Mappy, Rally-X, and Xevious.

May
May saw Rock Band Tuesdays house band Mario Speedwagon jet off to Atlantic City to compete in a national Rock Band competition. They lost, barely, but they’re still the champs of the Pacific NW! Golden Tee returned to the arcade, sharing a cabinet with World Class Bowling, another trackball game.

July
New pins – Cirqus Voltaire and The Machine: Bride of Pinbot, the latter with a rad LED lighting retrofit.

August
In August we celebrated our 10th birthday! To celebrate, we threw a weeklong party including our fourth Micropalooza chiptunes event. We also acquired a Killer Instinct 2 cabinet, in which we’re currently running the original Killer Instinct 1.

September
We upgraded our pinball collection again with Williams’ classic Tales of the Arabian Nights.

October
As a special Halloween treat, we debuted House of the Dead.

December
In the spirit of the season, we gave you several “new” games to play:

• Street Justice: The Old Town Beatdown, a custom multi-game featuring Bad Dudes Vs. Dragon Ninja, Final Fight, Ninja Gaiden, and Two Crude;
• the classic shooter Big Buck Hunter; and
• Finally, our pride and joy: a custom built and restored 6-player X-Men featuring a 42″ LCD display!

Looking forward to 2010. We have big plans!

- Posted by The CEO

You never know who you’re going to run into at Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade. Sometimes famous musicians wander over from the Roseland Theater after soundcheck. Sometimes athletes come from the Rose Garden and elsewhere. It’s amazing how word has spread far beyond Portland of what a great place GK is for classic gaming.

Last Sunday, I wasn’t at all surprised to see noted pinhead Todd MacCulloch,who went to U-Dub and played in the NBA for the 76ers and the Nets. Todd is a lifelong pinball fan, owns over 30 pinball machines, and is currently ranked 104th in the world as a pinball player. Todd had driven down from Seattle with his infamous Pinball Posse to compete in GK‘s first annual Pinbrawl pinball tournament. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of playing Todd head-to-head on a few of our machines. I put up 650M on White Water, my best score ever, but Todd beat me with 750M, so I knew firsthand that he’s a great player and a definite contender for Pinbrawl’s Pinhead Trophy. Unfortunately, Todd had an off day, and got knocked out about halfway through the tourney.

In mid-afternoon, another tall gentleman approached the counter with a question. After answering, I asked him, “has anyone ever told you that you look a lot like Brent Barry?” He replied, “yeah, my ID says that all the time!” Turns out, Brent was in town with the Houston Rockets, currently doing battle with the Portland Trailblazers in the NBA playoffs. Brent’s a great guy and a NW favorite, having balled for the OSU Beavers and the Seattle Supersonics, but I’m only rooting for him to win video games this week. I watched him tear it up on Championship Sprint, finishing in 1st place ever time. The hand-eye coordination that makes Brent such a deadly shooter makes him a helluva gamer as well! Brent says he visits GK every time his team is in town.

Brent and Todd were gracious enough to have their picture taken with me:

At 5′-11, I’m not used to feeling so short!

Afterwards, Todd and I gave Brent tips on convincing his wife to let him buy his favorite game, an Addams Family pinball machine.

If you ever see someone famous at Ground Kontrol, please be respectful, and don’t interrupt them in the middle of a game. And let the attendant at the counter know, so we can get a picture of the celebrity with their favorite game!

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

1980 was the year that color video games started taking over American arcades. It was weird, sitting at home and playing color games on the Atari 2600, but only having black & white games (sometimes with cheesy color overlays) to choose from at the arcade. Were color monitors that much more expensive? One of these days I’m going to have to track down the answer…

Anyway, it was a glorious day when I walked into the arcade and saw Galaxian for the first time. Finally, a color arcade game! It didn’t take long before most of the black & white games were gone, replaced by the sexy new color ones:

Star Fire (Exidy, 1980) – This was my favorite game when it came out. The arcade I went to had the sitdown version. The logo ripped off Star Wars, as did the TIE fighter enemies. This was the best simulation of flying through space I’d seen, at least, until I got an Atari 800 computer with Star Raiders.

Tempest (Atari, 1980) – Atari’s weird color vector game was very, very different from other games. It was like staring down a weird mecha-tube that had space bugs crawling up it. I never could master killing the bow-ties once they got to the rim, which meant I sucked. But Tempest let me skip ahead to the hard levels, one of the first games to do so.

Centipede (Atari, 1980) – Videogames used to seem so slow, like the CPU couldn’t draw stuff fast enough. Oh yeah, that’s exactly what was happening! But Atari had the best programmers, and they knew how to milk the 6502 for all it was worth. And they knew how to design games so it seemed like there was a lot going on. Centipede could be rather frantic, and the sound effects made it moreso.

Phoenix (Centuri, 1980) – The local 7-11 had one, back when 7-11s had mini-arcades. I liked it better than Galaxian or Galaga. GK used to have one, but I was one of the very few that played it regularly, unfortunately, so it went into storage.

Berzerk (Stern, 1980) – “The humanoid must not escape!” Berzerk was a simple, yet exceedingly difficult game, which I only played to hear the cool robot voices.

Missile Command (Atari, 1980) – There was one in the basement of my college dorm. This guy named Bobo would skip class and play Missile Command all day. The game had a bug which would give him a whole bunch of bonus cities (150?), at which point he’d get bored, and go get a beer. He’d let me play while he was gone. Being able to play at the high levels without worrying about dying made me a decent player pretty quickly. After that, I could make 200,000+ points pretty regularly. No Bill Carlton, but good enough to make the top score on most Missile Command machines. Oh yeah, Bobo flunked out – no surprise there!

Defender (Williams, 1980) – Great sound, and a world that seemed bigger than those in other video games. Too bad I sucked at it.

Warlords (Atari, 1980) – Kinda like a weird 4 player competitive version of Breakout. Each player had a castle in their corner of the screen, and the object was to deflect the fireball ricocheting around the screen destroying castles. If you pressed your button at the right time, you could catch the fireball, then release it with spin at your opponents. I think this was the best 4P game, ever. Oh, how I wish GK had one!

Monaco GP (Sega/Gremlin, 1980) – An overhead view driving game, with a cool twist – while in tunnels, you could only see what was illuminated by your headlights. The arcade I frequented had the nice sitdown version.

Crazy Climber (Nihon Bussan, 1980) – the pizza joint where we used to hang out had one of these. I loved the smug look of the vultures and the terror in the face of the falling man on the marquee. The two-fisted joystick control over the climber’s arms was a great concept, but poorly executed. The arms would never go where I wanted them to, so I never made it to the top of the fourth building.

Pac-Man (Bally/Midway/Namco, 1980) – Not my favorite, but I have to give Pac-Man his due. This was the game that catapulted video games into the mainstream. Pac-Man was on the covers of magazines, and “Pac-Man Fever” was on the radio. The arcade became very popular, and video games started showing up in other places.

It’s hard to believe so many great games were released in one year. I know I’ve left out some other classics, but these are the ones I remember playing. Sorry if I missed your favorite!

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

As you’ve probably noticed, walking into Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade is like entering a timewarp back to the heyday of arcades, the early 80s. The owners of Ground Kontrol have a lot of fond memories of those days, and GK is our way of keeping those memories alive.

The first arcade that really made an impression on me was the one at The World of Sid and Marty Krofft, the strangest amusement park ever. This was in 1976. This may have been the first arcade I went to that had video games. Video games were still in their infancy, all crude black & white games such as Pong, Tank, and Sprint 2. Electro-mechanical (EM) games still ruled, though their days were numbered.

About a year later, around the same time that Star Wars was released, an arcade opened in the local mall. It started out with a mix of EM and video games. Over time, the EM games were replaced with video games and solid state pinball machines.

Arcades started popping up in more and more places. Prior to this, I don’t remember arcades outside of beach towns, amusement parks, and other touristy locations. I have to think the increase in the number of arcades was because the new video games were more profitable and more addictive than EM games.

I got my driver’s license in 1979, and pretty soon my brother and I were heading to the mall every time we could scrape up a few quarters. It was great time to frequent arcades, because it seemed like the arcade had a new video game every week. Some of the early black & white games I remember:

• Death Race (Exidy, 1976) – loosely based on the movie Death Race 2000, this was a black & white 2 player driving game with an overhead view. The point was to run over pedestrians! When you did, a tombstone would pop up. This was the first video game banned for violence. I was lucky my local arcade had one!
• Starship 1 (Atari, 1976) – This was the first space game that really felt like flying through space. It had a great cabinet design, and the enemy ships looked vaguely like the ones in Star Trek, but it was too hard.
• Night Driver (Atari, 1976) – I think this was the first first-person video driving game. I remember getting really excited when it came out, because unlike the EM driving games, it was possible to suspend disbelief and feel like you really were driving at night.
• Space Wars (Cinematronics, 1977) – The first vector game, and an adaptation of Spacewar!, the original video game. Atari released their own adaptation as a 2600 cartridge, called Space War, of course. I spent an unhealthy amount of time flying really fast in wraparound mode, trying to avoid crashing into the star in the middle of the screen.
• Super Bug (Kee Games, 1977) – Perhaps the first scrolling overhead-view driving game, it seemed like Super Bug had more variability than other video games from that era, which were mostly static, boring affairs, probably due to how expensive and limited microprocessors and memory were at the time.
• Fire Truck (Atari, 1978) – A fun update of the Super Bug concept, in that there was one fire truck and two steering wheels – one for the front of the truck, and one for the back of the truck. A lot more fun than it sounds. Really, the world needs more cooperative-play video games!
• Space Invaders (Bally/Midway/Taito, 1978) – This is the first video game that people talked about outside of the arcade. Hugely popular.
• Lunar Lander (Atari, 1979) – Atari’s first vector game, the object of which was to land a lunar module on the moon. I was nerdy enough to already be familiar with the math behind this game, having played the totally numerical lunar lander game on the programmable HP-65 calculator in calculus class many, many times.
• Asteroids (Atari, 1979) – Asteroids seemed like such a simple game, yet it was very difficult to master. Another wildly popular game.
• Tail Gunner (Cinematronics, 1979) – Another early vector game, and one of the first sitdown cockpit cabinets. I loved any game that simulated flying through space!
• Football (Atari, 1979) – The first game I can remember with a trackball (one per player, actually). Moving your player involved a crazy amount of trackball spinning. Sometimes we played until our hands got blistered!
• Star Castle (Cinematronics, 1980) – A simple but challenging vector game. It came out just as color games were getting more prevalent, which definitely hurt its popularity.
• Battlezone (Atari, 1980) – It’s hard to imagine how impressive a simulated 3D game was in 1980, even if the environment was constructed with only a few vectors. A great description of how Atari managed 3D on low-cost hardware can be found here.

The black & white era was about to end, though. More on this in a future post!

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

Some people don’t realize that there were arcades before the advent of video games. Arcades originated in the 1800s, featuring all sorts of electro-mechanical (EM) games that cost a penny to play. Hence the name “penny arcade”. If you’re interested in seeing what sorts of EM games were found in early arcades, check out the Penny Arcade website (no, not that Penny Arcade!).

My first arcade memories date from the early 70s, from trips to the beach. Back then, it seemed like the beach was the only place I ever saw an arcade. They had no video games, just EM games, and arcade staples such as skeeball. Pinball was the king of EM games, of course. But there were all sorts of other EM machines:

• Shooting Games – these usually featured a gun mounted at chest level on a fixed pivot, pointed at targets behind a glass bezel. Midway’s The Sportsman is a typical example.
• Driving Games – the steering wheel controlled a plastic car on the end of a pivoting stick, which was overlaid on the track. This could be a projected film loop of a cartoon racetrack, as in Chicago Coin’s Speedway, or motorized belts representing different lanes, such as Bally’s Road Runner. Some games featured a motorcycle instead of a car, but they weren’t any better. Other than Atari/Namco’s F-1, I only recall driving games as being pretty crude.
• Submarine Games – the player would peer into a periscope, shooting simulated torpedoes at mechanical ships. Midway’s Sea Raider is a good example.
• Pitch & Bat (Baseball) Games – these looked like a pinball machine, only the playfield looked like a baseball field. The pinball would pop out from a metal flap that represented the pitcher’s mound. Pressing a button would swing the bat, which would either go into cups representing singles, doubles, or triples; into holes representing outs; or if you were really lucky (or really good), up a ramp and into the home run area. The backglass area had diorama of the infield with a circle going around the bases. Whenever you got a hit, a baserunner would pop up and circle to the appropriate base. Williams’ Upper Deck was one of the last pitch & bat games made.
• Whac-A-Mole – this game was in a class all by itself. Moles would pop up out of holes, and you had to hit them with your hammer before they went back in their holes. I remember still seeing these in pizza parlors throughout the 80s.

There were other oddball EM games of all sorts, but I’m having a hard time remembering them. One that I do recall was Midway’s Stunt Pilot. It featured a dayglo diorama lit by a blacklight, which tended to draw kids to it like moths to a flame. The object was to fly a tiny little airplane in circles and do various stunts. I think the airplane was reflected on a two-way mirror, so it floated over the diorama like magic. If the plane crashed, a little ambulance would come out with the siren on, which was hilarious.

I wish Ground Kontrol had at least a few of the classic EM games. Unfortunately, when you run a business, you sometimes have to put your personal preferences aside. EM games other than pinball just don’t have the popularity to “earn their keep” on our arcade floor. We make our money 25 cents at a time, and so sometimes we have to make hard choices.

Next time, I’ll cover the rise of video games and how they changed arcades.

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

One of the challenges of running an arcade is keeping things fresh. If things are the same for too long, then customers develop tunnel vision, heading straight for their favorite game and ignoring everything else. So we’re constantly on the lookout for “new” games. Because we prefer the classics, we usually wind up buying them used. And that means it usually takes a lot of effort to make them ready to operate at Ground Kontrol for 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. It takes time to find the parts, get the game working reliably, powder-coat pieces that receive wear, clean the cabinet, reproduce and apply artwork, and get a game looking the way we want it to. Sometimes it takes a couple of days, sometimes it takes over a year. But we think it’s worth the effort, which why we keep doing it.

Being the time of year to feel retrospective, I decided to list the games we added over the course of the 2008:

NBA Jam
Marvel Vs Capcom 2
The Simpson’s Pinball Party
Cruisn’ Exotica (x2)
Rush 2049 (x2)
TRON
Super Punch-Out!!
Super Street Fighter II Turbo (25″ screen)
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
Tekken Tag Tournament
Attack From Mars
Spider-Man
Scared Stiff
Smash TV
Sunset Riders

That’s over a game a month! Suddenly, I feel much better about our productivity.

Of course, whenever we add a game, we usually have to remove a game. It’s an unfortunate necessity when coping with limited space on the arcade floor. Here are the games that left Ground Kontrol in 2008:

Assault
Golden Tee
Multi-Pac
Neo Geo #2
Spy Hunter
Star Trek Pinball
Gauntlet II
Rush the Rock
Hydro Thunder
Smashing Drive
Punch-Out!!
Street Fighter II (19″ screen)
WWF Wrestlefest
Pac-Man (upright)
Elvira and the Party Monsters
Radical!
High Speed

…and our old-school photo booth moved around the corner to Backspace to make room for more games.

Some of these games will undoubtedly come back to GK someday. I know Spy Hunter, Golden Tee, Punch-Out!!, and WWF Wrestlefest are on the list. Like I said, though, these things take time, so please be patient with us.

We’re working hard to bring more games to Ground Kontrol in 2009, too. The next time you visit, be sure to look around, because you never know when you might see one of your old favorites returned to its former glory!

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

My father was a hard man. He was all about work, work, work, usually 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. He didn’t approve of art, he didn’t approve of play, and he certainly didn’t approve of video games. So, it was a shocker when he got hooked on Space Invaders.

I’m pretty sure it was the winter of ’80/’81. It was around the time that Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, I know that much. Of all the weird things, Chapman had been my archery instructor at summer YMCA camp when I was younger. And at the time I heard the news, we were living just around the corner from the house he grew up in, and 2 or 3 blocks from where he went to high school. It’s all etched very vividly in my memory…

Anyway, we had an Apple ][ computer, and I bought a copy of the Space Invaders clone that ran on it (Super Invaders, I think). It was one of the more faithful ports of an arcade game to the Apple ][. Every day when we got home from school, me & my brother would have a mini-tournament to see who could get the high score.

One day our father (who worked at home) asked if he could play. The next day, he wanted to play again. After that, he was participating in our Space Invader tourneys every day. And he got pretty good at it, too.

Eventually, I tired of Space Invaders. The local 7-11 got a Centuri Phoenix machine, so for awhile I was going to play that every day. Then a really good clone of it called Falcons came out, so we started playing that at home, my Dad included. But that was the last video game I can remember him playing. We moved pretty soon after that. I got an Atari 800, and me & my brother started playing Star Raiders. I think it was too complicated for my dad, which is too bad.

In retrospect, I wish I’d found more games he was interested in playing. Some of my fondest memories of my dad are from that winter we played Space Invaders every day. Who says video games can’t bring a family closer together?

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

When I was 13, the rulers of mid-70s Saturday morning television, Sid & Marty Krofft, opened what is still the weirdest theme park ever, The World of Sid and Marty Krofft. It was an indoor amusement park, located inside a building in downtown Atlanta. Because of this, there weren’t very many rides. Here is a scan of a poster that shows how big it was.

The whole place was overrun w/ with bizarrely dressed mimes, jugglers, puppeteers, and of course, various Krofft characters such as H.R. Pufnstuf and the Lids from Lidsville. It was unbelievably weird and surreal.

The coolest ride was the giant pinball machine. The balls were large enough for (I think) 4 people to climb into, and after the attendant made sure the safety bar was in place, a giant plunger would come towards you to “launch” your ball into the machine. Lights would flash, and the ball would spin and “carom” off various objects in its path, such as the giant pop bumpers, sling shots, and flippers. In reality, the ball was being pulled by a chain on a predetermined path. But the sights and sounds made in seem like it really was a giant pinball machine. It was one of the most fantastic minutes of my life! Too bad it didn’t last longer.

And that’s what sucked about The World of Sid and Marty Krofft – it was over too, too soon. There were only 3 or 4 rides, which you could only ride once, and they only lasted a minute or two each. Then they’d herd you to the exit to the next level. I think we spent more time waiting in line at the entrance to get in than we did inside the park! We could have spent all day at Six Flags for what it cost to spend two hours at TWoSaMK. No wonder they went out of business inside of six months.

Believe it or not, CNN’s studios are now located in the space vacated by TWoSaMK. For all I know, Larry King broadcasts from where the pinball machine used to be. I’d rather have the fabulous giant pinball machine, that’s for sure!

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

Ok, it wasn’t my video game; it belonged to my best friend, Terry S. Terry was the neighborhood badass. He started smoking cigarettes in kindergarten, I kid you not. His dad was a chopper pilot in Nam and kinda scary, but he let us peruse his massive collection of Playboys, so he wasn’t all bad. Terry’s mom was Swiss, and was as cold & distant & beautiful as an Alpine peak. Terry did pretty much whatever he wanted, but he was envious that my parents cared enough about me that I couldn’t do whatever I wanted. And that was pretty sad (Terry, that is).

Anyway, for Christmas 1972, Terry got a Magnavox Odyssey. It was the first video game any of us had ever seen, and it was so cool. It was the first home console, and it looked like something out of “2001: A Space Odyssey” (I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where they got the name from). You’d laugh at how crude the gameplay was, but back then, it was the future!

Every afternoon after school, we’d park our butts in front of the TV and play Table Tennis (the inspiration for Pong), Ski, Football, and Haunted House. About the time we were getting sick of those, Terry got Wipeout (a driving game) and Shooting Gallery. Definitely better than Gilligan’s Island reruns!

Unfortunately, Terry’s parents got divorced, his mom moved back to Switzerland, and he and his dad moved to a “swingers” apartment complex where there weren’t many kids. I didn’t see much of Terry after that. Last I heard, he had a pretty serious drug problem. In 8th grade. Poor guy.

In retrospect, the Odyssey looks rather unsophisticated, but it was actually a work of genius. The system didn’t have a CPU, so the cartridges were just a bunch of jumpers to reconfigure the game’s internal analog circuitry. As an electrical engineer, I’m amazed that they got so much out of so little. But there were limits to what could be done. The system was black & white. Backgrounds consisted of colored plastic overlays that were held to the TV screen by static cling. Changing games required changing overlays as well as cartridges, and sometimes entailed a nasty shock when the overlay was peeled from the screen. So primitive. But as a kid in 1972, the Odyssey was pretty far out!

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

I fell in love with pinball when I was 9, in the summer of ’72. My mom was the campaign manager for a realtor running for the State Senate, and the campaign HQ was a terribly boring place for a kid. I could usually finagle a quarter or two from her by stuffing several hundred envelopes with campaign literature. Then I could go to the drugstore on the corner. I wasn’t into candy, so I would either buy a couple of comic books (they cost 12¢ back then!), or play the old bat game in the corner.

If you’re too young to remember bat games, they were like a pinball machine, only the playfield looked like a baseball field. The pinball would pop out from a metal flap that represented the pitcher’s mound. Pressing a button would swing the bat, which would either go into cups representing singles, doubles, or triples; into holes representing outs; or if you were really lucky (or really good), up a ramp and into the home run area. The backglass area had diorama of the infield with a circle going around the bases. Whenever you got a hit, a baserunner would pop up and circle to the appropriate base. It might sound quaint now, but back then it was pretty exciting. If you scored enough runs before you made 3 outs, then you’d win a free game.

Midway through the summer, just when I was getting good at the bat game, the drugstore got a pinball machine. I wish I could tell you which one, but I can’t remember (maybe because pinball machines looked and played so similarly back then). It was love at first sight. I stopped buying comics, and started working extra hard to earn quarters to play pinball!

Pinball was so much faster and more dynamic than the bat game. With the bat game, the ball came from the same spot, at the same speed, every single time. With pinball, it could come from just about anywhere, and be slow, fast, or sometimes spinning. And there where two bats, not one. I quickly figured out that it was best to use them independently, in case the ball grazed off of one towards the other. Thus began a lifetime ambition to master their use.

After that, I played pinball whenever I could. It seemed like pinball got even more popular with the release of the Tommy movie in 1975, and Elton John’s version of “Pinball Wizard”. And Bally started releasing tables like Captain Fantastic and Evel Knievel that were so much hipper than the fuddy-duddy ol’ Gottliebs.

When I was 14 or 15, an arcade opened at the mall. They actually had a choice of pinball machines to play! Mata Hari, Playboy, Sinbad, Flash, and Star Trek were some of my favorites from those years. And none of them were electro-mechanical – they were solid state. What I didn’t know at the time was that pinball was going through a phase of great innovation. More on this later…

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

Seems like we get an email like this about once a month:

“I am writing first of all to thank you for the best arcade I have been to since ever. But also because I would like to start something similar in my own town. I am hoping you’d be able to maybe answer a few questions about how to get started and what kinds of things to avoid.”

Thanks for the kind words! We don’t want to discourage you, because the world could definitely use more classic arcades, but…if it was an easy thing to open a classic arcade like Ground Kontrol, then don’t you think every decent-sized town would have one?

GK has been in business almost 10 years now, and for the first 6, we struggled to break even. At first, it was run full-time by the owners, because there wasn’t money for employees. Business came slowly, mostly by word-of-mouth. Looking back now, it’s hard to believe we almost didn’t make it. Luckily, we could afford to be patient through the lean years.

The biggest challenge has always been keeping the games running. Ground Kontrol is, if you think about it, a hands-on museum. We have games up to 35 years old, and they were designed to last only a few years! Repairs can be challenging, and parts nearly impossible to find. Luckily, 2 of the owners are electrical engineers, and the other 2 are software guys that know something about hardware, so there’s very little we can’t handle. And we finally were able to afford to hire a full-time repair tech a few months ago (hard to believe it took so long). Still, keeping 90 or so games running is a logistical nightmare, as you can imagine.

We’re lucky in that we’ve had nearly 10 years to build up a pretty decent collection of games. It seems to be getting harder to find classic games in good condition. The cheap ones got snapped up years ago, and eBay makes people think they deserve collectible prices regardless of condition. And speaking of eBay, fuel prices make the cost of shipping games prohibitive. So, you’re probably limited to what you can find in your local market via Craigslist, unless you’re willing to pay premium prices.

In conclusion, running an classic arcade is more a labor of love than a way to make money. But Kevin Flynn has long been one of our idols, and there’s nothing better than living your dreams. All in all, Ground Kontrol has been worth the hard work

If we haven’t discouraged you, then we’d like to wish you the best of luck in your venture! Just don’t open a classic arcade in Portland – this town is barely big enough for one!

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

Good question! There are several possible reasons:

• Your favorite game is one of our favorites, too, but we haven’t been able to find one in good condition at a reasonable price. Games we’re looking for include Smash TV, Dragon’s Lair, and Medieval Madness.
• We used to have your favorite, but we had to put it in storage because we replaced it with a more popular game. For instance, Gyruss and Phoenix.
• Your favorite isn’t what we consider to be a classic game. Example: Space Jam. Sorry, not every game can be a classic.
• We own it, but it’s broken. Spy Hunter is at the top of this list.
• We own it, but we’re trying to get it working and/or figure out where to put it. Final Fight, Sunset Riders, and our fabulous new 6-player X-Men all fit this description.
• We like to consider ourselves experts on classic games, but there’s always a possibility we don’t know that our arcade is seriously lacking without your favorite game. Please, tell us what games you’d like to see at Ground Kontrol!

We wish we had a massive warehouse filled with at least one copy of every pinball machine and video game ever made – the ultimate coin-operated gaming museum. Well, maybe not, because then we’d have to keep them all running!

The reality is, we’re paying downtown rents, so we only have a limited amount of space. And that limits how many games we can have.

Our goal is to have as many of the Killer List of Video Game’s Top 100 games as possible, but unfortunately we just don’t have room. So we have to make tough choices, based on which games get played the most. It makes us sad, but we have to if we want to stay in business.

In a future post, I’ll talk more about our plans to offer more games.

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

We occasionally get letters such as the following:

I enjoy visiting Ground Kontrol and it is on my top list of places to take people who are from out of town. The atmosphere and staff are consistently great, and I was excited to see that you have broadened the bar selection.

However, I have noticed that recently when I visit there are a lot of games in disrepair. Recently, I visited and found that Soul Caliber II, DDR, and the ATM were all broken. (All huge factors in my patronage.)

As it turned out, the ATM was fixed within an hour, DDR had a coin jam that was cleared when someone brought it to the attention of the staff, and Soul Calibur II worked fine when it was rebooted the next morning.

We know people travel great distances to visit Ground Kontrol, and it really sucks when your favorite game is broken, or isn’t working 100%. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to keep everything working all of the time. We’re engaged in an epic battle with entropy, fighting the damage caused by abusive customers, pinballs imparting their kinetic energy to brittle plastic parts, and the ravages of time on machines up to 35 years old. Sometimes games seem to be haunted by gremlins that disappear whenever we’re looking for the problem. And sometimes replacement parts are unavailable (we recently purchased a spin caster so we can cast our own metal replacement Battlezone handles!).

Still, I don’t want to make excuses. We can do better. We need your help, though. If you encounter a problem, tell the person behind the counter. They can note the problem in our repair wiki and put an Out Of Order sign on the machine if necessary. They can refund your quarter, too.

Please, do not turn off a game! Legally speaking, that is an act of vandalism. We know your heart’s in the right place, but it’s our machine, and it’s up to us to determine whether it’s out of order or not. Also, telling no one helps no one – we need to know what happened. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve found a game turned off, only to turn it on and see nothing wrong with it. Then we have to wait until someone else has their game ruined, and hope that they report the problem.

If you feel like the staff didn’t log your problem, or if on a return visit you find the problem is still there, let the management know what happened, and when, by sending us an email. We’ll do our best to address your issue. We can’t fix every problem quickly, but at least we’ll know there’s a problem to fix.

BTW, we just hired a great new repair tech, Ryan Vyborney. He worked several years at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. If you see a guy in cycling gear working on a game at GK, that’s probably him. He’s quickly working his way through our repair backlog, and should have things back to 100% soon. That is, until something else breaks.

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

As you may have noticed, Ground Kontrol‘s bar now starts serving every day at 5PM. Here are some frequently asked questions, and answers:

Why aren’t kids allowed after 5PM?

The OLCC won’t allow it, except under very special circumstances. Apparently, having a high wooden counter (i.e. a bar) and dim lighting is enough to create a “drinking environment”. And you can’t have kids near a wooden counter with dim lighting while there’s alcohol around, heaven forbid!

Recently, the OLCC did liberalize their rules slightly, so we can now have minors present while alcohol is served, during private parties. See our rentals page for details.

Aren’t arcades for kids?

We grew up in arcades during the 70s & 80s, and find modern arcades to be an abomination. Ground Kontrol is an arcade for adults, hence our focus on old school games and lack of stupid redemption games. Kids are welcome (before 5PM), and they usually have a lot of fun, but they’re not why we’re in business.

Why alcohol in an arcade?

We serve alcohol to make ends meet. GK is a labor of love, not money. Our out-of-town customers frequently tell us that there aren’t any classic arcades in their town. Why? It’s a tough business. We’re lucky that Portland is the sort of place that will support a classic arcade.

Do you have a happy hour?

Yes, but we can’t advertise it outside of GK. Please call us @ 503-796-9364 for details.

Why did it take so long for you to have a happy hour?

In March, we asked the OLCC to change our serving time from 7PM to 5PM. You’d think that would be a simple thing that would take a week at most, right? Sadly, it took four months. The good news is, the OLCC’s rules changed during that time, so we were able to change some of our other license restrictions, too.

Why can’t you have all-ages shows?

We’re not brave enough. Whle the OLCC’s new Minor VI posting allows all-ages shows, and GK was the first establishment in Oregon to receive a Minor VI posting, we’ve chosen not to have all-ages shows at this time. Unfortunately, no matter how much a venue does to keep minors from drinking alcohol, the OLCC can close a premises to minors if even one minor is caught with alcohol. This is like telling a store that they can’t sell candy if somebody shoplifts one candy bar! Though not allowing minors wouldn’t put us out of business, we really appreciate it when parents bring their kids to show them what arcades were like when they were a kid. So, we’re going to wait and see how the rules are enforced at other venues.

Have questions of your own? If so, please leave them in the comments section, and I’ll try to answer them!

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO

Looking around the Interwebs, I can’t seem to find any blogs about arcades. Maybe it’s because nobody cares about the inner workings of arcades, or maybe it’s because most arcade owners are too busy or too old to write a blog. I suspect people are interested, because my employees regularly ask me questions that customers have asked them. So, I’ve decided to start a blog about Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade, in hope that somebody finds it interesting. Enjoy!

Update: Here is another arcade blog, for Arcade UFO in Austin, TX.

The CEO

- Posted by The CEO