Gorf

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Gorf
Studio Midway Games
Publisher Midway Games
Senior Developer Jay Fenton
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 1981
genre Shoot 'em up
Game mode Up to 2 players take turns
control 8-way joystick ; Trigger
casing Standard and Cocktail
Arcade system Z80 (@ 1,789773 MHz)
sound chips: 2 × Astrocade , Votrax SC-01
monitor Raster resolution 204 × 320 (3: 4 vertical) Color palette: 256
One of six boards in the arcade version
Gorf plug-in module for the Atari 2600

Gorf is an arcade game by the US company Midway Games , it dates back to 1981. The name of the game was represented by the manufacturer as an acronym for "Galactic Orbiting Robot Force". It is a fixed shooter with a total of five levels, with the individual levels acting like five individual different games in one game. The game was known for its heavy use of synthetic speech during gameplay, which was unusual in this type of game at the time.

Game description

The aim of the game is to destroy all enemies on the screen. The player controls a spaceship that can be moved to the right, left, up and down. The movement in the vertical direction is limited to the lower third of the screen. The ship can fire individual shots, so-called "quark lasers", which slowly run up the screen.

In contrast to similar games from this time, in which the player can only fire a single shot and can only shoot again until this shot has disappeared from the field, the player at Gorf could shoot again at any time. As a result, the laser beam that had already been fired disappeared immediately from the screen.

The game is divided into five different missions, each of which represents a completed mini-game with its own rules. After the player has successfully completed all five missions, the player's rank is raised and the game starts again in the first level. The game ends after all lives in the game have been used up. The player can achieve the following ranks during the game:

  • Space Cadet
  • Space Captain
  • Space Colonel
  • Space General
  • Space warrior
  • Space Avenger.

Ports

Gorf was ported to the Atari 2600 , Atari 5200 and ColecoVision consoles. In terms of home computers, the game was released on the Atari 8-bit computers, the BBC Micro , Commodore 64 and VC20 in 1982. Due to copyright problems, the Galaxian level has been removed from all ports. The game was later ported to the Atari Jaguar by a hobby programmer. This version was soon withdrawn from the market due to copyright problems.

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