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Paintings, sculptures and ... video games? For Mount Rainier's Joe Brewer, whose hobby is restoring old arcade machines, it's not such an odd combination.

"I was always interested in the machines as an art form," Brewer said. "The decals, the different paint jobs — each one's unique and different."

Brewer, 30, will donate one of his machines, a restored Deluxe Space Invaders unit, to the International Video Game Hall of Fame in Ottumwa, Iowa, in early August.

The machine is one of 14 vintage coin-operated games Brewer has in his home, and when they're all turned on, his basement glows, bleeps and buzzes like a real arcade.

Brewer said his love of the games dates back to his childhood, when he spent frequent afternoons working through a roll of quarters at an arcade in Greenbelt.

"I was never very good at any of the games," Brewer said. "I never had any of the high scores."

But fond memories of the games stuck with him, and while driving with his wife in October 2008, he noticed a Laundromat was throwing away a broken, coin-operated Ms. Pac-Man game. He told his wife, Stephanie, he wanted to go back and get it.

"I really didn't want to bring it home, but I decided it would be something fun for him to do," she said with a laugh.

Joe Brewer said he got the game to work again simply by tightening a few wires.

"I even made a profit, because there was $5 in quarters inside," Joe Brewer said.

He spent six months restoring the machine to its original condition, which included installing a new monitor screen and repainting the outside designs to match the original colors.

"That started the obsession," Joe Brewer said.

Joe Brewer, who works as a code enforcement inspector for the city of Hyattsville, has found most of his subsequent machines on Craiglist, trying not to pay more than $150 to $200 per machine. He's been able to restore some machines and sell them for as much as $500.

"I never spend more than I know I can get back out of it," Brewer said.

As the collection grew to include Donkey Kong, Centipede and other machines, so did his wife's appreciation.

"I have a lot of the high scores," she said.

Despite the artistic and resale value, the machines aren't just museum pieces. The Brewers occasionally throw parties for friends to come over and play the games.

Even Joe Brewer's mother, who was skeptical of the hobby at first, finds time to play when she comes to visit, Stephanie Brewer said.

"It's something the whole family enjoys," Stephanie Brewer said.

Brewer's collection has grown large enough that he now has a chance to share his appreciation for arcade art and make his own contribution to video game history.

The donation to the International Video Game Hall of Fame is part of the organization's campaign to collect one copy each of the approximately 4,500 different coin-operated arcade games ever produced, said Walter Day, who is on the hall of fame's board of directors.

"All these things are valuable icons in the tapestry of pop cultural history," Day said. "Video game collectors are all, in their own way, curators of their own little museums ... doing historical preservation work in the name of personal hobby."

Brewer said he sees the game machines as artifacts, relics from a time when video arcades were social-gathering places.

"It was where friends met up and hung out when you were growing up," Brewer said. "There's not really a place like that anymore."

E-mail Daniel Leaderman at dleaderman@gazette.net.