Gorf is an arcade game released in 1981 by Midway Mfg., whose name was advertised as an acronym for "Galactic Orbiting Robot Force" . It is a multiple-mission fixed shooter with five distinct modes of play, essentially making it five games in one. It is well-known for its use of synthesized speech, a new feature at the time.

Description

Gorf's objective is to simply destroy all enemies. The player controls a spaceship that can move slowly left, right, up and down. (Its vertical movement is limited to the lower one-third of the screen.) The ship can fire a single shot (called a "quark laser" in this game), which travels slowly up the screen. Unlike similar games, where the player cannot fire again until their existing shot has disappeared, the player can "re-fire" their laser at any time, causing their existing shot to disappear immediately (if it hasn't already).

Gameplay is broken up into five distinct "missions", each one essentially a minigame in its own right. Successfully completing all five missions will increase the player's rank and loop back to the first mission. The game continues until the player loses all of their lives. The player can advance through the ranks of Space Cadet, Space Captain, Space Colonel, Space General, Space Warrior, and Space Avenger, with a higher difficulty level at each rank. Along the way, a robotic, synthesized voice heckles and threatens the player, often calling the player by their current rank (for example, "Some galactic defender you are, Space Cadet!"). Some versions of Gorf also display the player's current rank via a series of lit panels in the cabinet.

Vague collision detection was a feature of the game intended to shorten the playing time - enemy shots that did not appear to actually impact on the ship object would still destroy it if they passed in close proximity.

Gorf is well-known for introducing or popularizing two new features (for its time) to the video game market. Its most notable feature is its robotic voice, powered by the Votrax speech synthesis chip. Most games, even today, that feature human and robot speech use digitized voice samples rather than a speech synthesizer. Also, Gorf is one of the first games to allow the player to buy additional lives before starting the game. Most games offer a predetermined number of lives (usually three) and allow the player to earn additional lives throughout the game. Gorf, which was usually set to offer two lives per coin, allows the player to insert extra coins to buy up to seven starting lives.

The underlying hardware platform for Gorf allowed arcade operators to easily swap the pattern, CPU and RAM boards with other similar games, such as Wizard of Wor. Only the game logic and ROM boards are specific to each game.

Gorf was originally intended to be a tie-in with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but when the game designers read the film's script, they realized that the concept would not work as a video game and changed its title. Even so, the player's ship bears a passing resemblance to the Starship Enterprise flipped upside-down.

Missions

The central goal of each mission is to destroy all enemies.

Mission 1: Astro Battles	Mission 2: Laser Attack	Mission 3: Galaxians	Mission 4: Space Warp	Mission 5: Flag Ship

Mission 1: Astro Battles
The first mission is almost an exact clone of Space Invaders. This is the only mission that is not set in space, but rather against a sky-blue background. A small force of enemies (24 in Gorf vs. 55 in Space Invaders) attacks in the classic pattern set by the original game. The player is protected by a glittering parabolic force field that is gradually worn away by enemy fire. The force field switches off temporarily while the player's shots pass through it.

Mission 2: Laser Attack
In this mission, the player must battle two formations of five enemies each. Each formation contains three yellow enemies that attempt to dive-bomb the player, a white gun that fires a single laser beam, and a red miniature version of the Gorf robot.

Mission 3: Galaxians
This mission is a clone of Galaxian, with the key differences being the number of enemies (24 in Gorf vs. 46 in Galaxian) and the way the enemies fire. Gameplay is otherwise similar to the original game.

Mission 4: Space Warp
Mission 4 places the player in a sort of wormhole, where enemies fly outward from the center of the screen and attempt to either shoot down or collide with the player's ship. It is possible to shoot enemy shots in this level.

Mission 5: Flag Ship
The final mission is a one-on-one battle with one of the earliest bosses in the video game industry. The Flag Ship is protected by its own force field (similar to the one protecting the player in Mission 1), and it flies back and forth and fires at the player. To defeat it, the player must break through the force field and destroy the ship's core — if they hit a different part of the ship, the part breaks off and flies in a random direction, potentially posing a risk to the player's ship. It should be noted that the part of the mother ship that breaks off can actually be shot by the player to earn bonus points. If successful, the Flag Ship explodes in a dramatic display, the player advances to the next rank, and play continues on Mission 1, with the difficulty increased.

Sequel

The sequel, Ms. Gorf, was never released. It was programmed in the programming language Forth. The source code for the prototype is owned by Gorf programmer Jay Fenton (now known as Jamie Fenton). Unfortunately, the game exists only as source code stored on a set of 8-inch floppy disks, and is difficult to retrieve.

Ports

Gorf was ported to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and ColecoVision game consoles and the Atari 8-bit, BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and VIC-20 personal computers in 1982. Due to copyright issues, the Galaxians mission was removed from all ports. It was later ported to the Atari Jaguar by a hobbyist programmer, but quickly removed from the market because the author neglected to secure any permission from the copyright holders.

Records

The current world record score for Gorf, recognized by Twin Galaxies and The Guinness Book of World Records was set by Todd Rogers on November 24, 1982 at Haunted Trails in Burbank, Illinois with a score of 653,990.

References

External links

• Article at The Dot Eaters, featuring a history of Gorf
• Video from the C64 Version on archive.org