Robb Manke’s addictions started with just one. He cashed in some baseball cards around 1993 and got his first taste. “It became addictive,” he recalls, “very addictive.”



From there, though he took a break for a while, he felt the compulsion to collect more.

Now his collection of original arcade-style video games sits at 10 games, including his most recent acquisition, Centipede, which marks the entry into the room of his North Tacoma house he alternately calls “the museum” and “the Man Parlour.” It’s his personal refuge and place to decompress.



Manke, a South Sound native, has always been a collector, starting with the baseball cards, which segued nicely into his later collections. He collected BMX bikes, and he collected band posters including unusual works of pop art by artists for bands like Nirvanva, Pearl Jam, Lenny Kravitz, the Violent Femmes and 311, among others.

And then he heard of a Tron video game for sale, for $250.



He remembered playing the game as a kid and discovered one locally for sale. Later, his collection grew to include a Star Wars Game, Asteroids, Sinistar, table-top versions of Tempest and Joust, and his most recent acquisition, a petite-sized Centipede game he located on Craigslist on Saturday, and drove to Portland to pick up on Sunday.

“It was a long day,” he chuckles wryly.



Part of his hobby, with the BMX bikes as well as the arcade games, is the restoration of the items. The bikes he looks at as being “like models,” only rather than painstakingly gluing tiny pieces of fender onto toy cars, he’s painstakingly bleaching original wheels and scrubbing pedals.



Similarly with the arcade games, restoration is a large part of the hobby. “The hardest part is to keep them going,” he explains. There’s the electronic circuitry — an aspect he’s not yet terribly comfortable with, though he has plans to take some classes to learn more about how to work on the high-voltage pieces. And then there’s the cabinetry and console element, which he’s more comfortable with, since three of his degrees deal with the practical aspects of art, ranging from commercial art to the art of teaching art.



Of the machine’s cabinets, Manke says, “I view them as pieces of pop art.”



But Manke’s quest is nearly complete.



Though he says, “The hunt is fun, and the hunt for parts,” he thinks he’s run the course of this addiction.



“I’m trying to round out my collection and then I’m done.”