It’s daytime outside in Portland’s Chinatown, but inside Ground Kontrol, the dark lingers in dim corners and shrouds silent video games that line the arcade’s two main rooms. But when Ground Kontrol co-owner Anthony Dandrea turns on the power, the space is transformed into a magical otherland. Games ding, ring, trill, burble, and chirp as monitors flicker to life and lights begin to race. Robotic voices from deep within talk to whoever is near.
One of these resurrected games is Tempest, whose dark screen is now sliced through by glowing lines. “It has a special vector screen,” Dandrea explains. This screen was dreamed up by video designers trying to make 3D graphics in a time before computers were really capable. Instead of graphics being painted across the screen, as 3D graphics now are, they are drawn across the dark monitor as if with a pencil. A game with a similar vector screen is Battlezone, where a tank of glowing green lines moves across a minimalist landscape. This type of 3D graphics vanished from use around 1985, but at Ground Kontrol, games using them glow on, as do other classics such as Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Asteroids.
Today, Dandrea is attempting to repair an original 720° Atari skateboarding video game with sickly visuals. Having partially disassembled the monitor, he hooks up a tube restorer and analyzer that confirms his suspicions that the vacuum tube the game depends upon is old and tired. However, these types of tubes aren’t made anymore, and haven’t been for 10 years, so he tries to work with it. He puts the monitor in restore mode and tweaks the colors until the blue, red, and green burn with equal intensity, turning what was a yellowish white into a neutral white. This he counts as a win. “Now back to the game,” he says. “720, there it is!” In the other room, a mechanic reaches into the guts of a pinball game, trying to get it up to working speed. At Ground Kontrol, there are nearly three times the number of monitors in storage waiting to be called into action as there are games on the floor.
Ground Kontrol was founded in 1999 by Neal “Kneel” Cohn and Betty Farrier, who met working at Reverb Records and wanted a place to put their personal arcade games. The video games initially consisted of classics like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and the early pinball lineup included Black Knight, The Addams Family, and a vintage 1978 Star Trek game made by Bally. In 2003, when Cohn and Farrier were ready to move on, they approached other people to take it over. One of them was Dandrea.
“Upon moving to Portland, I spent a lot of time hanging out at Ground Kontrol, first as a customer and later helping them maintain the games,” Dandrea says. He grew up in Ohio and repaired his first video game when he was in college, a free Battlezone he hauled home from a work-study job and tinkered with until those magical vector lines appeared. After graduating, he expanded his personal collection of arcade games and began operating them in local businesses. When he moved to Portland, he brought this collection with him. Now he is one of Ground Kontrol’s four owners, all of whom are also skilled arcade game technicians.
In 2018, Ground Kontrol completed a major expansion; the arcade now has two main rooms, one original and one new, which are connected by a hallway. This has doubled the bars and the space for people, events, and arcade games, which include popular newcomers to the party like Star Wars Battle Pod and Pac-Man Battle Royale alongside the classics like Battlezone, Tempest, and the 720°. The website also claims a total of 40 and a half pinball machines—the half, I learn, is Baby Pac-Man, which is a hybrid of pinball and videogame. To maintain these games, Ground Kontrol has three full-time techs on staff, and owners and other staff also chip in.
Anthony Dandrea, one of Ground Kontrol’s owners, has been repairing arcade games for decades.
In total, the arcade bar has more than 40 employees. Among them are bartenders who pour drinks from noon to 2:30 a.m. every day; on Saturday nights, they serve hundreds of barhoppers and game players. Ground Kontrol’s two bars have a combined total of 20 taps, which pour a rotating selection of local microbrews and hard ciders as well as an increasingly popular CBD soda from Ablis. But the biggest hit is the Princess Peach cocktail, a pint of hard apple cider with blueberry vodka and peach schnapps that gets its name from a Mario Kart character.
The arcade attracts all kinds of people—adults who want a return to childhood while holding an alcoholic beverage, visitors following rumors of one of the largest classic arcades in the world, fanatics who get a thrill out of the mechanics of monitors and tubes and pinball machine parts. For Dandrea, the buzz of the arcade, the people and games, the lights and sound make for a timeless shared experience. Another shared experience, he says, is putting quarters on a game’s marquee to claim the next round. It’s game time.