New high score: Biggest pinball arcade in Canada celebrates first birthday in Cornwall, P.E.I.

The lights dance and bells ring as the steel balls bounce around under glass at Seven’s Pinball-o-rama, which celebrated its first birthday this past week.

There are nearly 40 pinball machines and about 10 arcade cabinets.

With a background in IT, Seven Graylands does the work on the machines himself. Early on, maintenance was one of the biggest challenges.

“First couple of months that we were open, it was nuts,” said Seven Graylands. “I had a lot of machines offline because they hadn’t been played this hard in 30 or 40 years, and then a bunch of people come in and then they start banging on them and everything breaks at the same time.”

With most of the big repairs done, fixes these days are usually simple and quick.

Graylands and Sophia Kreuzkamp moved across the country last year to open the arcade, turning an impressive private collection of pinball machines into the biggest pinball arcade in the country.

Both the owners were surprised just how popular the arcade has become, a post about the opening of the arcade became the top post on Reddit.

“We’ve had so many folks coming in since then that they said they saw our post, from all over the world, but especially across Canada,” said Kreuzkamp. “And even people on P.E.I. that were like, ‘I did not know this was on P.E.I., this is amazing.’”

A competitive pinball player found out the arcade had some of the same games as an upcoming contest and spent two days training at the arcade.

Graylands said people have been coming through the doors steadily since they opened.

“A lot of people said, ‘Oh, P.E.I. hibernates in the winter,’ and so we kind of planned and expected in early winter, snow starts to fall, we’re probably going to lose traffic. Didn’t happen,” said Graylands.

The pair have had such success with the arcade they are now looking to expand to a new location.

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