Today we’d like to introduce you to Markus Bailey.
Hi Markus, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’m Markus Bailey, and I’m a TV host on PortalOne’s Arcade Show. I’m half American and half-Norwegian, so basically, I am a Viking with some extra flavor.
PortalOne is a video game company and the ultimate destination for hybrid games. Hybrid games combine what people love about games with what they love about TV and bring them together into one experience. In the PortalOne mobile app, we have a variety of games in all kinds of genres that you can play throughout the day. Then, every day at 6 PM PT, the Arcade Show takes place inside the PortalOne app, where our players meet different special guests and celebrities. During the show, the guest plays one of our games, immersed as a real person inside the game as a character – and then the players at home get to play against them and can win prizes if they do! It’s unlike anything else out there, and it’s a new concept for a lot of people, but it’s pretty cool.
Growing up, I loved watching late-night talk shows. I’ve always had an ambition to work in the entertainment industry. My career started with a quick Google search: “How to become a TV Host.” The first thing that came up was an ad for hosting a children’s TV show “Barne-TV”. After a couple of auditions, I got the gig, and since then, I’ve been super lucky in my career as a host: I’ve worked on productions in Norway like “The Voice” “Idol” and been a contestant on shows like “Dancing with the Stars” and “The Masked Singer”. It was during my time on “The Voice” that I first met Stig Olav Kasin, the co-founder of PortalOne – he had been leading on bringing “The Voice” to Norway.
In 2019, I received a call from Stig Olav saying they were looking for a host for a new TV & games concept – PortalOne – and were opening a studio in LA to produce the show. I was excited: while PortalOne was newly founded, there was a lot of buzz surrounding the company. They’d had a lot of investment from some big names, including Scooter Braun’s TQ Ventures, Arielle Zuckerberg, and the founder of Riot Games. The company had also confirmed a partnership with Atari, which meant they got the rights to all of their biggest titles, including Centipede, Breakout, Pong, and many more. My inner child was buzzing! On top of that, the team is awesome – I knew Stig Olav had also worked on international TV formats like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” and his brother and co-founder Bård Anders Kasin had previously worked as Technical Director at Warner Bros. working on franchises like the Matrix Trilogy. I said yes, and the rest is history!
Since relocating to Los Angeles, it’s been amazing to interview hundreds of entertainers and surreal to get the opportunity to interview huge names like Demi Lovato and Tori Kelly. We’re still in the early stages, but the vision for PortalOne is to have hundreds of games and shows in every genre, where every player at home can play games with their favorite creators.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
PortalOne was founded in Oslo, Norway in 2018, and in 2020, we were ready to open our first production studio in LA – as of course, there’s no better place than LA to work with talent. 2020 was also the year of the pandemic, which made it a lot more difficult to build our LA studio given the restrictions on flights and VISAs at the time. The pandemic meant that this process took a lot longer than we wanted, but luckily, we had an awesome partner on the ground in LA — ARRI, the global leader in camera and lighting technology, who is also one of our investors – to help us out with sourcing locations and the initial setup. In 2021, our team was finally able to make a trip to LA to add all the final components to the studio, and within two weeks, we were able to start using the LA studio for productions. We haven’t slowed down since – I’ve now hosted over 500 episodes of the Arcade Show and counting!
As you know, we’re big fans of PortalOne. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
In the PortalOne app, we host the Arcade Show every single day. This means each day sees a new special guest in the show, so we’re always on the lookout for interesting people to join us. The cool thing for guests joining the show is that they have a whole episode focused on them, showcasing them and their work. Guests can show us their craft or unique talent as part of their episode, whether that be magic tricks, a musical performance, or anything in between! It’s a cool way for people who have a great story to tell or project to promote to do that – while having fun playing games for a couple of hours. If anyone out there is interested, check out our website and get in touch. https://www.portalone.com/guest-portal/
You can also check out our games and shows on the PortalOne app, which is available on Google Play and the App Store. It’s free to play, and there’s a chance to win prizes every day. And, you don’t have to be a hotshot gamer to win: every day, people are winning by skill OR luck, it’s wide open! https://portalonearcade.onelink.me/MxnY/voyageLA
PortalOne is really an experience like no other because it merges TV and video games at its very core. Over the last decade or so, the entertainment industry has seen a real shift where traditional entertainment, like music, TV, and film, has been merging with video games, which have exploded in popular culture in recent years. If you think about how some games are becoming TV shows and movies recently – like Super Mario Bros or The Last of Us – they’re great examples of this. There are also the big live events happening in games, with artists like Ariana Grande and Travis Scott doing concerts in Fortnite: this really demonstrates how the worlds of music and games are merging. There are similarities between those concerts in Fornite and what we’re doing, except PortalOne has these live events happening in the app every single day rather than as one-offs. This is something that everyone is very excited about and really differentiates us.
To make PortalOne possible, we’ve made some serious technological breakthroughs in terms of how we produce our shows. We’ve managed to bring the cost of our studio production down to 1% of what it would be in a traditional virtual production studio. This breakthrough is what enables us to host shows every day and will empower us to launch more geographies and scale up our content to produce more shows and games in the future. We started broadcasting the Arcade Show every single day earlier this year, which was a huge milestone for us given that what we’re doing is massively complex. It felt like we really became closer to achieving our vision of becoming the ultimate destination for hybrid games, just like Netflix is for TV & film, and Spotify is for music and podcasts. In the fast-paced world of entertainment you’re always moving from one project to the next, so to have this kind of longevity is really special for me.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Every summer, I would visit my family in Maryland. My dad and uncle would take my cousin and I to Chuck E. Cheese or Dave & Buster’s. At the time, we didn’t have arcades in Norway, so this was a sensory overload for me and the coolest thing ever! Even though I think my hearing may have been slightly damaged from going so much…
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.portalone.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/portalone_official/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/portalonearcade
