With 238 pinball machines and another 200-plus games, Hillsboro’s Next Level Pinball Shop & Museum bills itself as the largest arcade in Oregon. It can add to that, best place to play pinball in the world, after winning Favorite Pinball Location at the annual TWIPY Pinball Awards, held Saturday in Frisco, Texas.
The TWIPYS are the people’s choice awards of the pinball world, organized by “This Week in Pinball,” a popular pinball enthusiast website. Last year, in addition, to winning Favorite Pinball Location, Next Level took home the TWIPY for Favorite Pinball Tournament.
The arcade’s size and unique payment model make it a fan favorite. All of Next Level’s pinball and arcade games are set to free play, so no coins or swipe cards are needed. Visitors pay $20 for a day pass for unlimited play.
Next Level opened in 2017 with a relatively modest (but still substantial) 100 games in 10,000 square feet of warehouse space near the Hillsboro airport. Over the years, the collection of games and memorabilia has grown to take up the entire 20,000-square-foot building, with plans to add on another 6,000 square feet next year.
“We have a big 10-year plan,” said co-owner Jordan Carlson. “If you think of Disneyland, we’re trying to build Arcade-land. We’re eventually going to hold close to 1,200 arcades and pinballs.”
It’s not just the games that make Next Level stand out. It’s the thousands of pieces of pop culture memorabilia found throughout the arcade, from movie posters to life-size superhero statues. Both the arcade and museum are the result of years of pop culture collecting by the Carlson family – first by Fred Carlson and then by his son and daughter-in-law, Jordan and Whitney Carlson.
Fred bought his first few pinball machines in the 1970s, intending to create a small family game room. That personal collection snowballed, eventually overtaking a barn and becoming a home arcade. Fred passed his love of arcade games to his son, who continued buying broken pinball machines over the years and repairing them.
When Fred started collecting games, he was curating a bit of everything: VHS tapes, bubble bath dispensers, TV trays, Pokémon, vinyl records. Every inch of wall space in Next Level is covered with a dizzying array of pop culture items, stacked to the ceiling in about 200 custom-built cases.
In Fred’s words, he collects “everything except money.”
Most impressively, he has what’s believed to be the world’s largest collection of lunch boxes, about 3,146 of which are on display at Next Level. They include some of the first character lunch boxes marketed to children, such as the 1950 Hoppalong Cassidy lunch box by Aladdin Industries, which changed the lunch box game forever.
“You can typically get people to come into museums once or twice to check it out, but how do you get people that come three, four, five, six times a year?” Jordan said. “We’re really trying to cater to all different generations so that someone will come in, find a piece from their childhood that sparks a happy memory, and have a good time. Then you throw in the 500-odd games as a bonus.”
The Hillsboro community has also begun to donate items, including several hundred loose Star Wars figures that are on display and hundreds of vintage Time magazines.
“Some people literally come in here for three hours and just look at everything on the walls and don’t even play a single game,” Jordan said.
For those who do want to play, Next Level has plenty of options, particularly for pinball fans. The oldest pinball game on the floor is 1977′s Night Rider. The rarest? Sega’s 1998 Golden Cue, which was never officially released. Only 10 test games were created, and you can play one of them in Hillsboro.
Next Level has popular pinball games like Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars and Stern’s new Godzilla, along with the most produced games of all times like Addams Family and Eight Ball Deluxe.
Next Level runs weekly pinball tournaments every Friday, and is also a distributer of new pinball games, selling pieces from Stern, Jersey Jack, Chicago Gaming and American Pinball.
“The pinball community is so big in Oregon and in Washington,” Jordan said. “I believe it’s because of all the rain that we get here.”
The Carlson family owned a landscaping business for 13 years, before Fred retired and Jordan devoted himself full-time to the arcade. Whitney, who manages the day to day of the arcade with her husband, always liked arcades but has grown to have deeper appreciation of them.
“My husband is a huge dreamer, so him putting something like this together and bringing it to life is amazing to watch him do,” she said. “I became very invested in it as well because we decided this is going to be our life. We’ve got to make it the best, we’ve got to be next level. And that’s the name. We are Next Level.”
Next Level Pinball Shop & Museum
Next Level is about to enter its second busiest week of the year: Oregon spring break. (The busiest is Christmas break.)
Spring break hours: Noon-9 p.m. Monday-Wednesday, March 27-29; noon-11 p.m. Thursday-Friday, March 30-31; 10 a.m.-11 p.m. Saturday, April 1; and 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday, April 2.
All other weeks, Next Level is closed Monday-Wednesday.
Next Level is at 1458 N.E. 25th Ave. in Hillsboro. For more information visit nextlevelpinballmuseum.com.
Looking for more spring break activities? Check out our list of 36 ideas for spring break adventure in Oregon.
-- Samantha Swindler, sswindler@oregonian.com, @editorswindler