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Portland is about to get a steampunk video game palace almost twice the size of downtown retrocade Ground Kontrol.
Quarterworld will be a 4,000-square-foot pinball museum, arcade and bar in the old Alhambra Theatre music venue on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, which closed for the umptieth time in June 2015.
Owner Phil Ragaway hopes to be open for business by March 2016.
Quietly, Ragaway is the unchallenged baron of Portland pinball. He already leases machines to over 140 bars around town under the name Quarterworld, and says he's storing an additional 10,000 square feet of games that don't have a public home. If you've played pinball in Portland, chances are you were playing on Ragaway's machine.
The Hawthorne Quarterworld arcade will amount to a huge coming-out party for Ragaway's massive game collection, unparalleled in Portland—including what Ragaway is calling a playable "pinball museum." He's particularly excited about a Big Lebowski machine he's got coming in, which he says will be the only one in Portland.
The machines will take quarters, but Ragaway also anticipates letting you add credits to the games via a Bluetooth phone app, the same way you can currently play songs on bar jukeboxes using your phone.
Ragaway is more realtor than bar operator of late, but has a long history in Portland bars and restaurants, owning at various points Shanghai Tunnel, Bossanova, Bar of the Gods, Genie's and Tiny's—and, of course, the Mount Tabor Theatre, which he operated as a music venue before it was redubbed Alhambra.
Quarterworld will have both over-21 and all-ages sections, and Ragaway anticipates that the entire arcade will become an over-21 bar after a time cutoff.
He imagines Quarterworld as "kind of a retro gaming arcade, kind of a club with a member structure. You join the membership club, you get perks, benefits access to prerelease parties [for new cabinet games and pinball machines], a lot of unique structures. A lot of good zingers."
Ragaway also expects to host game tournaments in the space, and anticipates being able to project video of games in progress onto the walls.
The decor will be "a hybrid between steampunk and clockworks, without being overly produced. I like fine details, I want it done just right— finish work, making sure the bones are good, fire sprinklers, city requirements, and getting the stink out of the bathrooms."
That last point—the restrooms, the overall cleanliness of the place—is apparently a big issue. He's already spent days and days replacing all the restroom fixtures and tile. Ragaway is a father now, he says, and wants to make sure it's a place where he could set his child down on the floor without his wife complaining.
Ragaway says he doesn't expect to eat into Ground Kontrol's business considerably, however.
"Ground Kontrol are friends of ours," he says. "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."
Willamette Week