Portland has been the longtime home of the retro arcade bar Ground Kontrol, but last year it was joined by a more modern cousin: Outrage, an “esports bar” where the TVs stream competitive gaming matches rather than traditional sports.
It’s an emerging concept for bars, and it’s crossed the river to Vancouver, where a new esports and video game themed bar called Vault 31 Bar looks opened its doors two weeks ago.
Owner David Kaulitz describes Vault 31 as an esports bar, but he adds that the esports crowd is just one of the communities he’s targeting, and he hopes the bar becomes a place where they all can hang out and hopefully break down some of the barriers between them.
He didn’t necessarily set out to create a bar, he says, but he was inspired to create some sort of business that could bring together people from the communities built up around several of his hobbies: video games, tabletop games and traditional sports — chiefly roller derby.
Kaulitz says there are plenty of people like him that overlap into the more than one of those hobbies, but the respective communities can be somewhat shuttered. A bar seemed like the most natural fit to break down those barriers, he says.
“I kind of wanted one space, one hub, where they could all get together,” he says. “At the core, hopefully it’s just a chill place to hang out.”
Developing Vault 31
Kaulitz previously has worked in information technology and tech support, but he majored in business and said he’s always had the goal of starting a business of his own.
The 33-year-old entrepreneur says about two years ago he reached a point where he’d saved up enough to shoulder the business startup costs and began working with a leasing broker to find a location. Once he settled on the bar concept, he quickly decided it would be in his hometown of Vancouver.
“It had to be in Vancouver, just because there’s nothing over here,” he says. “There’s already an esports bar in Portland — I wanted to be the first one up here.”
He chose a site at 316 S.E. 123rd Ave., in a shopping center off of Mill Plain Boulevard, near the intersection with Southeast 123rd Avenue. Kaulitz says he’s confident the bar can find a regular crowd of customers, drawing on Mill Plain Boulevard’s and Interstate 205’s high traffic volume. The space has been a bar before. The previous tenant was the Vancouver branch of Flyboy Brewing, which closed in mid-2018. But renovations were still required to create the Vault 31 space, Kaulitz says, with upgrades to the plumbing, wiring and HVAC systems. Kaulitz custom built Vault 31’s bar counter, a wooden structure outfitted with lines of embedded glowing LEDs.
The buildout took about four months, he says, and there were some unexpected delays. The federal government shutdown delayed the background check fora liquor license. And then Clark County’s measles outbreak stretched the time it took for the county health department to inspect and certify the bar.
It cost about $130,000 to get the place ready, Kaulitz says.
Gaming space
Ground Kontrol, in Old Town Portland, draws in customers with rows of classic arcade machines and pinball tables lining the floor. Vault 31, by comparison, looks much more like a traditional bar, with tables and chairs in the center and rows of TVs mounted on the walls.
But there’s no shortage of gaming opportunities. A tower shelf full of video game consoles both retro and modern sits behind the bar, and Kaulitz has drawn on his IT background to wire things so that any of the consoles can be switched on the fly to output on any TV. Each console is paired with souped-up wireless controllers that can connect from anywhere in the bar.
Vault 31 is intended to be a nonelectronic gaming hangout too — one of the tables has a stack of card games and tabletop board games. There’s also a ceiling-mounted projector with a drop-down screen for larger events.
Vault 31 has a staff of three: Kaulitz and bartenders Trevor Rudd and Emily Sommer. Kaulitz has no background in bars or bartending, so he’s assigned himself to be the main kitchen staffer. Rudd took the lead in stocking the bar and developing Vault 31’s drink menu.
The liquor lineup is pretty standard, Rudd says, but there’s room to expand based on customer feedback. The fun part was coming up with the recipes for the bar’s cocktails, which all bear video game-inspired names such as Warp Pipe and Widowmaker.
“(I’ve been) just having some fun with the colors,” he says.
The TVs behind the bar show various sports scenes, gaming and traditional. In a typical configuration, visitors will most likely find them showing the Overwatch League, League of Legends and roller derby competitions — but that can be changed any time someone wants to power up one of the consoles.
Launch and future
The bar officially opened March 31 after a weeklong soft opening to give the staff time to work out any problems. Kaulitz says feedback since then has been positive.
“Our opening day on Sunday (April 7) was awesome,” he says.
Kaulitz says he’s intentionally a bit uncertain about how the bar will evolve. It starts with the idea of creating a fun space for several different communities, he says, and he has plenty of ideas for events to host, but beyond that he wants to refine the concept based on community feedback.
The bar has business licenses to air streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, and is also licensed as a movie theater for film events.
“Anything that can be streamed or played can be accessed here,” he says.
The bar oozes with a geeky vibe sure to appeal to multiple communities of gamers — not just because of the esports matches raging on TV, but also through the growing collection of memorabilia on the walls and counters — super mushrooms, item blocks and vintage video game posters.
Most of the decorations on the walls were donated by other community members, Kaulitz says, creating an ever-growing collage of memorabilia from various overlapping geeky circles.
“Everything you see on the walls belongs to friends and family,” he says.
