I actually worked for Bally/Midway from 1977-1982. I was in the factory in Franklin Park, Il, at the end of the production line as a repair tech, and later lead tech repairing ckt boards that came off the line with problems. They did all the fab work there from board etching to drilling to component placement to wave soldering. Boards that passed initial tests went to the Belmont facility for installation in the cabinets. The failures came to my department for troubleshooting. I wrote the field service manual for Galaxian. So, Space invaders through Galaga and Burger Time and Rally-X I worked on. I left the company as the arcade crash was happening. I have many very fond memories of that period! Some, not so fond-The Home Video Arcade game, AKA Astrocade, from Nutting & Assoc was one not so fond memory. :-).
@@kensukadventures628 As I recall, the game boards at least were made in the USA. There were options for UK currency settings by DIP switches on board and chip sets to match. Since the cabinets were made here too, I can only assume they were assembled and shipped, but I'm not sure since the looked the same on the outside. But I don't know for sure. Wasn't my department. 🙂
@@youarepredictable After Midway, I got another job as an electronics technician for a phone company in Arizona. I worked in the return/repair department for a bit, then in engineering where I worked on prototypes before product release. Worked there until I burned out, 20 years, and learned a new trade-Computer Aided Drafting, which I'm doing now.
@@mariobarrera420 cool. I guess it's one of those things that I've only found out recently were more widespread than I thought. I live about an hour west of the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina. We had ours in the mall here, right next to the food court.
Gorf is my favorite game of all time. I played this game for hours on end at a convenience store in our Texas town back in the day. I had been looking for a Gorf machine to restore for a while, but didn't have any luck locating one. I took matters into my own hands and scratch-built my own Gorf machine in 2015. Although it's not original, it's as close to the real thing as i am going to get. Very happy with it.
That's awesome, congratulations. It's amazing how arcade games were everywhere back in the early 80s. Convenience stores, department stores such as Kmart, restaurants, etc. people who didn't live through it wouldn't understand.
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries so true...and every mall had, at least, one dedicated arcade room with a minimum of 30 machines. Some even with hundreds!
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries It's true. As a little kid I remember playing Virtua Fighter for the first time in an A&P grocery store, of all places, back in the day.
I didn't grow up with them, but I still love golden age arcade games. I love games like Asteroids, Galaga, Gorf, Pole position, Donkey Kong, Pac-man, Popeye, Mario Bros, Berserk, Centipede, Missle Command, Excite bike, and many others. Those games are timeless.
Tapper; Burger Time; Bomb Jack; Robotron 2082; Bubble Bobble; Joust; Defender; Dig Dug; Pooyan; DKong Jr.; Ms. Pacman; Spy Hunter; Mappy; Space Harrier; QBert; Mario Bros.; Millipede; Tron. Absolute insanity. Most kids I knew started doing errands in their neighborhoods just to spend it all in these machines. Some kids pretended to know the guys with the top scores hehe. Better to be a kid now in theory because you can load all these up for free in mame, but the magic is gone.
I remember the arcade version saying things like "I am GORF" and "I'll eat your quarters"! Also, I've only done it a few times but it is totally possible to destroy the space ship with a single shot!
I think both my self and my mom did that once on the vic 20. It's also possible to "erase" the flag ship and not have any idea where the target is any more.
I remember playing this game at my Grandad's gas station/bait shop in Texas when I was a kid. There is no telling how many quarters I dropped into that thing. Thanks for the video, it brought back some great memories.
My uncles use to own a night club, WAY BACK IN THE DAY and they had a GORF machine in the club. When I'd spend weekends with my cousins, we'd go with my uncles in the morning while they cleaned up from the previous night and prepared for the upcoming evening. To keep my cousin's and I occupied and out of their hair while they did so, they would open the GORF machine and rack us up a ton of credits and we'd sit there for hour upon hours playing this masterpiece, over and over and over!! Love this game. :D
Same here bro.... and almost 40 years later I can't forget the amazing sensation after beating the flag ship for the first time! That awesome explosion.... 💥 So Sweet...
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries Who was working at Colico? seems they had the best on looking games for awile. I remember the controller not being so great though.
Played the hell out of this back in the day! I realty like this "History of..." series, learning alot about the games I used to play growing up. Never knew this was supposed to be a tie-in to Star Trek.
Played this when it came out.. spent many hours on it and have great memories from those days. 11 years old and hooked on Video games 😂 but life was good . Arcade1up what are you doing? This has to be a cabinet!
"She felt that the plot of the movie ("Star Trek: The Motion Picture") would not make a very good arcade game." Amazingly, the plot of the movie didn't make a very good movie, either. =)
Thanks for this! I, too had the Vic20 version, and played it so much that I would challenge myself to regularly destroy every sprite of the flag ship until only the final, flashing sprite was floating back and forth- The actual “target” sprite you had to hit to clear the level. One thing I will never forget- In the manual, I remember it saying something like “If you beat this game, expect a call from the Air Force- The REAL Air Force!” 7-year old me was disappointed... :)
I've done a bit of coding for the SC-01, it's an interesting chip because it uses phonemes to form words. You select sounds from a register to form words, it takes a little work to make things sound "right" sometimes. That same chip was used by Gottlieb for Q*bert by the way.
PatmanQC, I was just exposed to your channel approximately ten minutes ago. I came across the above video for GORF somewhere outside of CZcams, recalled playing this game numerous times as a young whippersnapper, and decided to watch the video. Upon opening it up on the CZcams website, I noticed your username, and I wondered if you were Quad Cities based, for Davenport is my hometown. At some point early in the video, I thought I might want to subscribe to the channel, and made a mental note to check it out after viewing. Then I discovered you had a Commodore VIC 20, just like I had, and GORF was one of your first games for the VIC 20, unlike my first game "Adventure", but I think I did eventually acquire it. So, a VIC 20, I then was more compelled to check out your channel. Eventually, I discovered in the comments that you have, or have had, some connection to the Quad Cities, so that settled the issue of subscribing to your channel which I will perform immediately upon completion of this comment. I am looking forward to viewing more of your videos.
Yes I've been in the quad cities all my life. At least you attributed the QC as quad cities most people think I'm from Québec. Sounds like you may be my brother from another mother. Glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for subscribing. I've been here all my life currently reside in Moline. Always nice to speak to another local on here. Cheers.
I remember working at a Pizza Hutt back in the day and in the arcade room, Gorf would be blasting. It was so loud and when I was closing the place with a coworker, it would creep me out because it would go off during the "insert coin" screen.
I have one of these games in my basement. It actually is a weird arcade game because it has a card cage with a bunch of circuit boards which do different things. And it is not "digitized speech", it is "synthesized speech". It is generated on the fly by the SC-01 chip.
I miss GORF! I used to play it on the arcade in Barry Island Butlins as a child with it taunting me. I played it on the Colecovision last night at the Cambridge Museum of Computing History! I made it to SPACE COLONEL!
This was my favorite and I played this M-F after school when I stopped at the arcade on my way home. On a typical day I'd make it to Colonel, on a good day I would make it General... and one time I made it to Warrior and I held the #1 spot on the leaderboard. I wish I could afford to buy the arcade version, I see them being sold every so often.
Oh man you picked a good one this time :) They had Gorf at the Land of OZ in Duck Creek Plaza for most or all of that arcade's existence, was one of my regular games :)
You know as I was reading this I thought land of Oz? That sounds familiar. Then you mentioned Duck Creek Plaza and I knew exactly where that was at :-) The only game I can recall being there was APB but I love going to that arcade
I just played this some weeks back at the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park. Still fun today, and rather challenging! Busting up that flagship just makes you feel like a champion.
I consider myself very lucky to be around at this great time. I was a student at the University of Georgia from 1979-1983, part of the Golden age of video games. We had arcades all over Athens, GA. There were “rock star” players whom students would gather around and watch. Space Invaders was huge and the best players knew how many shots it took before a spaceship zoomed overhead that you could shoot for extra points. I was best at Galaga and Gorf, but of course, not the best because I had a life beyond video games. I got pretty high on Gorf, definitely “Space Colonel” but maybe “Space General” but it could also be nerve wracking!
Gorf fascinated me when I was a kid and I discovered it back in 1981 because of the computerized speech. It was one reason that I developed an application that I still run today, a Voice internet Service that reads emails and web pages over the phone.
very much loved Gorf,first time ever playing it was at a discount store called "Hills" in Princeton,WV way before they moved to Mercer Mall and then later closed. Ah,the good ol' days.
Played this a lot early 80's in the Big Top Amusements (also known as rendevouz later) at Berwick Holiday caravan park in berwick upon tweed. Happy days indeed.
I mastered this game in the arcade back in the day. All I needed was 1 quarter to have my fill of Gorf ... though it cost me a fortune in quarters to get to that point🙂🙂🙂
People won’t understand how important GORF was unless they were around at the time. It was like having Captain Kirk in the Millennium Falcon because of it having already established games as levels, first crossover,first forbidden door. GORF should be in the conversation for genuine arcade legend that’s was so far ahead of it’s time we haven’t got to that time yet!
Damn. Way more informative than I would've thought for such a simple game from the past. One thing in particular is..............The clothing styles back then. OMG. Seriously though. That part about the digitized speech was the bane of many of us. "BAD MOVE SPACE CADET! HA HA HA HA HA HA!"
As ALWAYS very good mini docu's i began playng in 1983 (was a 10 year old) so i played all the arcades of the golden😇age... This brings back A LOT of good memories Thanks👍👍👍for posting & the time you put in these videos Thanks🙏😇again
Thank you so much, I started playing probably 1978 or 1979 so we are probably pretty close the same age. Thanks a lot, it is a lot of work but I enjoy what I do. If you could share my videos around I would appreciate it. Thanks
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries yeah i already shared the video (and others on your channel to my other oldschool gaming friends) i dont comment much but i do ENJOY the trips down memory lane😇 Thanks👍👍👍again Pd i AM suscribed to your channel😇
The local YMCA (Jordan in Indianapolis) had a console by the vending machines. I was enthused by the different modes of game play, but I was six and not good enough to get past the first stage.
I used to play this in a brasserie in Montreal after work, and I had the highest score possible on the machine. Eventually, I set the highest score on every GORF machine in town that I could find. I was really disappointed when they were taken out of circulation because GORF was the only game that I became really proficient on. LOL I miss those days!
Pacman came out in 80, gorf and galaga in 81 , and ms pac jan 82. Ms pac I think was the phenomenon. Most arcade games ever sold. :D I always thought until watching your video and checking dates that galaga came after ms pac in 81 since pacman was made in a wooden cabinet, about 1/2 of ms pacs seem to be wood and the other 1/2 was made from a particle board. Galaga was mostly made with the particle board. Awesome video as always. I learned more about Gorf watching this video than I never knew. I hardly ever got past the first and second stage.
Thank you but Pac-Man was a worldwide phenomenon. I can recall going into an arcade and there being four or five of these cabinets side-by-side all being played.
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries Oh pacman was definitely a huge phenomenon, Probably the biggest in my opinion even though ms. pac sold more. You said in the video though gorf came out between asteroids and pacman. I thought you meant to say ms pac. Do not mind me though. I love the channel, the stories, and the information you research. You even taught me something about ms pac after I looked up a few dates. Truly a great channel. :) Keep it up. I thumb up every video.
Jamie released the source code to GORF a while back. GORF was written using TERSE which is based on the FORTH language, with some assembly for speed. I've been involved in some Gorf reverse engineering work, albeit not to a great extent.
I was playing this the other day on MAME. You went to the arcades because that's where the hardware was . Ports for home were invariably poor cousins albeit nice cousins you could play with. AFAIK those early 8 bit games were written in assembly language or even machine code . You can't explain those days to kids today - although my kids sort of get it.
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries At the time, it was an awesome game, regardless of the simplistic, and minimalistic rudimentary control scheme it utilized, and it still remains an awesome game to this day. However, when it was first available to play, the people standing around the cabinet to watch the gameplay could get fairly crowded. If I recall correctly, I believe that may have been the first time I saw a secondary monitor mounted atop of a game cabinet so more people could watch the gameplay. I think Showbiz Pizza hurt themselves by lowering the number of games they had in their arcade. It seems the quantity of game cabinets dipped down to approximately twenty percent of what they offered previously.
I remember seeing this back in the day and wondering just what in the world it was. I’d seen Vanguard in a laundromat, and the tiny amount of speech in that blew my mind. By comparison Gorf was like a book on tape! I never played it, though. That first screen with the blue just does not work with my eyes. Everything gets lost and muddled in it, like I’m watching a slow motion seizure from inside my brain.
Great game. People crowded around it in my neck of the woods because it was multiple games in one. And as always there were people that could play it endlessly.
Gorf was a great game. The multi game feature made it stand out, even if it was just cloning other games. I don’t recall any other games of that early era where a single quarter got you such a variety.
I’ll never forget my parents got me ColecoVision for my birthday which came with Donkey Kong of course.. The other two games I got at first were Centipede(which I already was familiar with) and Gorf(which I requested because one of my neighbors said it was good..) I was surprised at just how good it was.. I was so in awe of the flag ship scene lol And the ranking system was a tremendous idea.. It was in retrospect like a greatest hits of shooters Galaga meets Space Invaders meets Gyruss..
Did you have the Roller Controller for Centipede? I think it came with a different game than Centipede, although logically one would think Centipede to be a leading contender for inclusion. I always wanted it, but I don't recall why I never acquired one. I had most of the other expansions for my Colecovision: Expansion Module #1 - The Atari 2600 adapter; Expansion Module #2 - driving controller with steering wheel & gas pedal; Expansion Module #3 - The Adam Computer; and I even had the Super Action Controllers which were a much superior controller than the originals just based upon the joystick alone. They also were suppose to have that Super Game Module I had plan on getting that was a different format of game storage than cartridge, and it could holder more data than the cartridges, and it also added RAM to the console, but if I recall correctly, I believe it was canceled, and replaced by the Adam Computer Module.
Correction the 5200 is analog control so it moves at whatever speed you want. As long as you have the actual analog joystick and a steady hand it might be better than the A800. Most plays use emulation on youtube so controles arent accurate. The player TB303 on CZcams has it if anyone wants to see. Only moves as fast as you move the stick. Thx
OK.... I had NEVER even heard of this game until I saw your video here.... Now I actually have the game on the Defender 40th Anniversary arcade 1up..... So fricken cool!!!!
Things I springboarded from this video, for subsequent Youtubing: 1: There's a video game called Space Chaser. 2: Ms. Gorf. 3: That the Vic-20 potentially had speech capabilities, albeit via an expansion. (I owned the infamous Superexpander.) Footnote: The reason the Vic-20's graphics were chunky (and occasionally not) is because it had a limitation whereby the only way to achieve more than one color in a given 8x8 block was to reduce the horizontal resolution by half in that block. I bumped my head against this limitation on occasion when I was making little games in Basic as a punk.
@@scottbreon9448 Neat, hadn't known that. I checked it out. The voices in that game are definitely digital. Which is maybe even more impressive. Definitely no way that could be done on an unexpanded Vic20 without a cart.
"Long live go-erf!" It's funny that there were and are SO many games that are very similar to Galaxians but they couldn't included one of those instead of "the" Galaxian to get around the Atari license.
Also one of the first games we had on the Vic-20, I'm not sure I would have noticed it in the arcade otherwise, I simply didn't see it around that often. I think this game does pretty well for a multi-screen game; it's not really 5 (or 4) games in one like Tron, it's one control scheme with multiple styles of challenge. This kind of design represented more of the future of games, using the same abilities in different ways.
Gorf was my all time favorite. My highest score was 435000. There was a programmed trick on the Astro Battles. At space general level when the Invaders moved to the right move your ship to the left. Fire a shot and let it hit the top the Invaders on the top right would blow up. It was programmed into the game. It wouldn't work on levels 41,71,and 121.
I don't recall Gorf at all. I was 1 or 2 when it came out, so by time I start going to arcades it likely had been cycled out for more popular games of the time. It's interesting see that this was the beginning of people trying shake up the formula of having a game do strictly one kind of thing repeatedly.
I loved this game when I was a schoolboy. Used to leave school for lunch and spend my lunch money on it in the local arcade. Even had the high score for a long while. I was always convinced there were some collision detection bugs though with unexplained player deaths.
Gorf always seemed to give you value for money. If you knew where to sit for certain levels you could last quite a while. Thanks for this Space Cadet, all hail the supreme Gorfian Empire.
Fenton programmed GORF in FORTH and had even started work on GORF 2. Hopefully the source code can be duplicated and preserved even if Fenton claims the development system used doesn't currently exist... The source code could be cross compiled once recovered. Someone should contact Fenton for preservation efforts - Curious Marc might be the guy to help!
I actually worked for Bally/Midway from 1977-1982. I was in the factory in Franklin Park, Il, at the end of the production line as a repair tech, and later lead tech repairing ckt boards that came off the line with problems. They did all the fab work there from board etching to drilling to component placement to wave soldering. Boards that passed initial tests went to the Belmont facility for installation in the cabinets. The failures came to my department for troubleshooting. I wrote the field service manual for Galaxian. So, Space invaders through Galaga and Burger Time and Rally-X I worked on. I left the company as the arcade crash was happening. I have many very fond memories of that period! Some, not so fond-The Home Video Arcade game, AKA Astrocade, from Nutting & Assoc was one not so fond memory. :-).
That is awesome. Sounds like a great time to be an arcade fan. Thank you so much for sharing your story:-)
were all the machines made in the usa then shipped worlwide, or did for example machines in teh uk get made closer to the uk?
@@kensukadventures628 As I recall, the game boards at least were made in the USA. There were options for UK currency settings by DIP switches on board and chip sets to match. Since the cabinets were made here too, I can only assume they were assembled and shipped, but I'm not sure since the looked the same on the outside. But I don't know for sure. Wasn't my department. 🙂
@stevedodder49 Wow, that's cool! Can I ask what you ended up doing career wise after those days?
@@youarepredictable After Midway, I got another job as an electronics technician for a phone company in Arizona. I worked in the return/repair department for a bit, then in engineering where I worked on prototypes before product release. Worked there until I burned out, 20 years, and learned a new trade-Computer Aided Drafting, which I'm doing now.
We had Aladdin's Castle in our mall, so many happy memories..
So do I, I the ours closed up about 25 years ago
That's what we had. It started out great, then they turned it from an arcade to a family fun center. Ruined it
I went to one as well in Corpus Christi at mall, and i recently found one of there coins in the street
@@mariobarrera420 cool. I guess it's one of those things that I've only found out recently were more widespread than I thought. I live about an hour west of the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina. We had ours in the mall here, right next to the food court.
The Aladdin's Castle i went to was at Northpark Mall in the Quad Cities, Iowa back in the 80s. I loved it every time i went.
Gorf is my favorite game of all time. I played this game for hours on end at a convenience store in our Texas town back in the day. I had been looking for a Gorf machine to restore for a while, but didn't have any luck locating one. I took matters into my own hands and scratch-built my own Gorf machine in 2015. Although it's not original, it's as close to the real thing as i am going to get. Very happy with it.
That's awesome, congratulations. It's amazing how arcade games were everywhere back in the early 80s. Convenience stores, department stores such as Kmart, restaurants, etc. people who didn't live through it wouldn't understand.
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries so true...and every mall had, at least, one dedicated arcade room with a minimum of 30 machines. Some even with hundreds!
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries It's true. As a little kid I remember playing Virtua Fighter for the first time in an A&P grocery store, of all places, back in the day.
Please! Take photos or make a video and post a link here. I would love to see your machine.
I didn't grow up with them, but I still love golden age arcade games. I love games like Asteroids, Galaga, Gorf, Pole position, Donkey Kong, Pac-man, Popeye, Mario Bros, Berserk, Centipede, Missle Command, Excite bike, and many others. Those games are timeless.
Those are all essential games if you are a retro gaming fan. Not a bad game in the bunch
Tapper; Burger Time; Bomb Jack; Robotron 2082; Bubble Bobble; Joust; Defender; Dig Dug; Pooyan; DKong Jr.; Ms. Pacman; Spy Hunter; Mappy; Space Harrier; QBert; Mario Bros.; Millipede; Tron. Absolute insanity. Most kids I knew started doing errands in their neighborhoods just to spend it all in these machines. Some kids pretended to know the guys with the top scores hehe. Better to be a kid now in theory because you can load all these up for free in mame, but the magic is gone.
I remember playing this game many times over the years, and never getting much higher ranked than Space Cadet. Ah Gorf....you brutal brutal beast.
I won one level but not two, I think.
Just discovered your channel Taking me back to my youth in late 70s early 80s 🕹📻👍👍👍👍
Thank you very much glad you enjoyed it
I remember the arcade version saying things like "I am GORF" and "I'll eat your quarters"! Also, I've only done it a few times but it is totally possible to destroy the space ship with a single shot!
I think both my self and my mom did that once on the vic 20. It's also possible to "erase" the flag ship and not have any idea where the target is any more.
I remember playing this game at my Grandad's gas station/bait shop in Texas when I was a kid. There is no telling how many quarters I dropped into that thing. Thanks for the video, it brought back some great memories.
Absolutely, thanks for sharing your story
My uncles use to own a night club, WAY BACK IN THE DAY and they had a GORF machine in the club.
When I'd spend weekends with my cousins, we'd go with my uncles in the morning while they cleaned up from the previous night and prepared for the upcoming evening.
To keep my cousin's and I occupied and out of their hair while they did so, they would open the GORF machine and rack us up a ton of credits and we'd sit there for hour upon hours playing this masterpiece, over and over and over!!
Love this game. :D
That is awesome, wish I had an uncle like that :-)
I had it for my ColecoVision, I was floored by how bright and colorful it was.
So was I, it was a really good conversion
Same here bro.... and almost 40 years later I can't forget the amazing sensation after beating the flag ship for the first time! That awesome explosion.... 💥 So Sweet...
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries Who was working at Colico? seems they had the best on looking games for awile. I remember the controller not being so great though.
Played the hell out of this back in the day! I realty like this "History of..." series, learning alot about the games I used to play growing up. Never knew this was supposed to be a tie-in to Star Trek.
I fell in love with GORF thanks to the VIC-20. What amazing memories! Thank you for such a great review.
So did I, thank you for watching
One of my favs and the first cabinet in my collection when I began a few years ago.
Awesome, I always wanted to own an actual arcade game. Congrats
My absolute favorite game as a kid. It still holds up today IMO.
It absolutely does
Gorf...the game that laughed at you dying...
LOL, you got that right
"Ha ha ha ha...too bad space cadet..."
True, although Wizard of Wor did that as well. LOL
Also, Space Fury ("Sooo, a creature for my amusement! Prepare for battle!") and creepy Sinistar ("Beware! I live! Run, coward!").
@@footofjuniper8212 "I HUNGER!" RON HOWARD!! RUN! RUN! RUN!
Played this when it came out.. spent many hours on it and have great memories from those days. 11 years old and hooked on Video games 😂 but life was good . Arcade1up what are you doing? This has to be a cabinet!
"She felt that the plot of the movie ("Star Trek: The Motion Picture") would not make a very good arcade game."
Amazingly, the plot of the movie didn't make a very good movie, either. =)
Couldn't agree more! LOL
"Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture", a.k.a. "Where Nomad Has Gone Before" :-D
Thanks for this! I, too had the Vic20 version, and played it so much that I would challenge myself to regularly destroy every sprite of the flag ship until only the final, flashing sprite was floating back and forth- The actual “target” sprite you had to hit to clear the level.
One thing I will never forget- In the manual, I remember it saying something like “If you beat this game, expect a call from the Air Force- The REAL Air Force!” 7-year old me was disappointed... :)
LOL, I will recall that in the manual. Of course the manual was the last thing I looked at :-)
Another great choice to cover. Lots of historical context with this one, some of which I learnt from the video alone. Once again, excellent work.
Thank you, I appreciate the nice words. I always enjoyed this game even as a kid
No worries, I have enjoyed the choices as of late because of the nostalgia they bring
I've done a bit of coding for the SC-01, it's an interesting chip because it uses phonemes to form words. You select sounds from a register to form words, it takes a little work to make things sound "right" sometimes. That same chip was used by Gottlieb for Q*bert by the way.
I had this game on my Colecovision. It was so much fun!
... and the arcade cabinet, what a beauty!
You are right, it was beautiful
Gorf was my favorite game in that that timeframe. Still love it!
So do I it's a classic
How have I not discovered this channel sooner? I've never played Gorf before, but it sounds very interesting. Awesome!
Thanks for the nice words, hope you enjoy the rest of my content
Thankyou, even the sound brings me back! Thanks 👍
Thank you for watching
First game I remember playing was the Vic-20 version of Gorf. Thank you very much for this
Absolutely, thanks for watching
PatmanQC, I was just exposed to your channel approximately ten minutes ago. I came across the above video for GORF somewhere outside of CZcams, recalled playing this game numerous times as a young whippersnapper, and decided to watch the video. Upon opening it up on the CZcams website, I noticed your username, and I wondered if you were Quad Cities based, for Davenport is my hometown. At some point early in the video, I thought I might want to subscribe to the channel, and made a mental note to check it out after viewing. Then I discovered you had a Commodore VIC 20, just like I had, and GORF was one of your first games for the VIC 20, unlike my first game "Adventure", but I think I did eventually acquire it. So, a VIC 20, I then was more compelled to check out your channel. Eventually, I discovered in the comments that you have, or have had, some connection to the Quad Cities, so that settled the issue of subscribing to your channel which I will perform immediately upon completion of this comment. I am looking forward to viewing more of your videos.
Yes I've been in the quad cities all my life. At least you attributed the QC as quad cities most people think I'm from Québec. Sounds like you may be my brother from another mother. Glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for subscribing. I've been here all my life currently reside in Moline. Always nice to speak to another local on here. Cheers.
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries According to Bob Seger "it" happens there in Moline!
I remember working at a Pizza Hutt back in the day and in the arcade room, Gorf would be blasting. It was so loud and when I was closing the place with a coworker, it would creep me out because it would go off during the "insert coin" screen.
I first played Gorf in a bowling alley restaurant. Definitely liked the variety in one cabinet. You pack a lot of great info in your videos.
Awesome! Thank you!
I have one of these games in my basement. It actually is a weird arcade game because it has a card cage with a bunch of circuit boards which do different things.
And it is not "digitized speech", it is "synthesized speech". It is generated on the fly by the SC-01 chip.
I miss GORF!
I used to play it on the arcade in Barry Island Butlins as a child with it taunting me. I played it on the Colecovision last night at the Cambridge Museum of Computing History!
I made it to SPACE COLONEL!
Awesome, good job. I would love to go to that exhibit, it sounds great
This was my favorite and I played this M-F after school when I stopped at the arcade on my way home. On a typical day I'd make it to Colonel, on a good day I would make it General... and one time I made it to Warrior and I held the #1 spot on the leaderboard. I wish I could afford to buy the arcade version, I see them being sold every so often.
One of my favorites as well
I always loved Gorf! Thanks for this video!
Thanks for watching
i love GORF!! thanks for the history. I'm checking out more. The GORF was super fun to play especially in the arcade, the cabinet rocked.
Glad you enjoyed!
We have a Gorf cabinet at my local arcade, it's a fun little game and I always play it first when I go
I always enjoyed it
The Flag Ship is the side view of the yellow Galaxian leaders.
I don't know how I missed this, Gorf has always been my goto machine for classic arcade games. GORF GORF GORF!
For me as well when I was a kid because you get more bang for your buck. Hope you enjoyed it
Oh man you picked a good one this time :) They had Gorf at the Land of OZ in Duck Creek Plaza for most or all of that arcade's existence, was one of my regular games :)
You know as I was reading this I thought land of Oz? That sounds familiar. Then you mentioned Duck Creek Plaza and I knew exactly where that was at :-)
The only game I can recall being there was APB but I love going to that arcade
Love your stuff man. Hope you do a video on Berzerk or Wizard of Wor in the future.
@Marshall W Indeed. Although Stratovox was the very first arcade game to have digitized speech
I just played this some weeks back at the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park. Still fun today, and rather challenging! Busting up that flagship just makes you feel like a champion.
I agree 100%,That was always really fun
Only arcade game I ever became excellent at. It was a great feeling to have people gather around me as I reached "Space Avenger".
Awesome.Kudos
I consider myself very lucky to be around at this great time. I was a student at the University of Georgia from 1979-1983, part of the Golden age of video games. We had arcades all over Athens, GA. There were “rock star” players whom students would gather around and watch. Space Invaders was huge and the best players knew how many shots it took before a spaceship zoomed overhead that you could shoot for extra points. I was best at Galaga and Gorf, but of course, not the best because I had a life beyond video games. I got pretty high on Gorf, definitely “Space Colonel” but maybe “Space General” but it could also be nerve wracking!
I never got anywhere that High so kudos for that
Gorf fascinated me when I was a kid and I discovered it back in 1981 because of the computerized speech. It was one reason that I developed an application that I still run today, a Voice internet Service that reads emails and web pages over the phone.
That's awesome that the game inspired you to do something like that. Thanks for sharing your story
I had the Vic20 version as a little kid and I probably haven't seen it since about 1980.
Holy nostalgia, Batman!
LOL, thanks
Well done sir -another great video! Thank you
Glad you enjoyed it Thank you so much
This was definitely my favorite space shooter due to the different levels.
very much loved Gorf,first time ever playing it was at a discount store called "Hills" in Princeton,WV way before they moved to Mercer Mall and then later closed.
Ah,the good ol' days.
The Golden age of arcade, thanks for sharing your story
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries I miss the 80s. Where every Pizza place and many restaurants in general had at least a couple Arcade machines.
Played this a lot early 80's in the Big Top Amusements (also known as rendevouz later) at Berwick Holiday caravan park in berwick upon tweed. Happy days indeed.
You have a new fan,i am from Romania and i'm absolutely crazy about your videos. Verry good chanel. You are great bro 😎
Greetings from the USA. You're the first person I've spoken with from Romania so cheers. Thanks for the nice words
I mastered this game in the arcade back in the day. All I needed was 1 quarter to have my fill of Gorf ... though it cost me a fortune in quarters to get to that point🙂🙂🙂
Most of my home playing of Gorf was on 2600. Also on my must play when I see a arcade cab.
The new Indy-developed 2600 game (GORF Arcade) is amazing. Plays great and has options for a few new variations.
People won’t understand how important GORF was unless they were around at the time. It was like having Captain Kirk in the Millennium Falcon because of it having already established games as levels, first crossover,first forbidden door. GORF should be in the conversation for genuine arcade legend that’s was so far ahead of it’s time we haven’t got to that time yet!
Fun Fact, many episodes of 80s tv series Silver Spoons showed Gorf, which was a game the kid in the show owned and was in his living room.
I can recall that,I thought he had the coolest living room ever :-)
There's a working cabinet of this downtown at 1984, a local arcade museum. First time I saw it in the wild was at a gas station in the 1980s.
It's amazing how arcade games were literally everywhere back then. Gas stations, Kmart, Target, etc.
Damn. Way more informative than I would've thought for such a simple game from the past. One thing in particular is..............The clothing styles back then. OMG.
Seriously though. That part about the digitized speech was the bane of many of us. "BAD MOVE SPACE CADET! HA HA HA HA HA HA!"
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it
As ALWAYS very good mini docu's i began playng in 1983 (was a 10 year old) so i played all the arcades of the golden😇age...
This brings back A LOT of good memories
Thanks👍👍👍for posting & the time you put in these videos
Thanks🙏😇again
Thank you so much, I started playing probably 1978 or 1979 so we are probably pretty close the same age.
Thanks a lot, it is a lot of work but I enjoy what I do. If you could share my videos around I would appreciate it. Thanks
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries yeah i already shared the video (and others on your channel to my other oldschool gaming friends) i dont comment much but i do ENJOY the trips down memory lane😇
Thanks👍👍👍again
Pd i AM suscribed to your channel😇
That's awesome, thank you so much for sharing it around
The local YMCA (Jordan in Indianapolis) had a console by the vending machines. I was enthused by the different modes of game play, but I was six and not good enough to get past the first stage.
Thanks for sharing, this was back when arcade games were literally everywhere :-)
Loved this vid! I only saw the game in arcades once or twice, but both times it had a lot of people watching. :D
Thank you very much
Great video dude and i will sub as i love these old arcade games..
I used to play this in a brasserie in Montreal after work, and I had the highest score possible on the machine. Eventually, I set the highest score on every GORF machine in town that I could find. I was really disappointed when they were taken out of circulation because GORF was the only game that I became really proficient on. LOL I miss those days!
That's fantastic
Ah, remembering my old birthday parties at Aladdin's Castle with my friends, and a free $50 worth of tokens a piece.
$50 apiece? Holy crap, I wish we were friends growing up
Gorf is my absolute all-time favorite video arcade game.
It is definitely a classic
Pacman came out in 80, gorf and galaga in 81 , and ms pac jan 82. Ms pac I think was the phenomenon. Most arcade games ever sold. :D I always thought until watching your video and checking dates that galaga came after ms pac in 81 since pacman was made in a wooden cabinet, about 1/2 of ms pacs seem to be wood and the other 1/2 was made from a particle board. Galaga was mostly made with the particle board. Awesome video as always. I learned more about Gorf watching this video than I never knew. I hardly ever got past the first and second stage.
Thank you but Pac-Man was a worldwide phenomenon. I can recall going into an arcade and there being four or five of these cabinets side-by-side all being played.
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries Oh pacman was definitely a huge phenomenon, Probably the biggest in my opinion even though ms. pac sold more. You said in the video though gorf came out between asteroids and pacman. I thought you meant to say ms pac. Do not mind me though. I love the channel, the stories, and the information you research. You even taught me something about ms pac after I looked up a few dates. Truly a great channel. :) Keep it up. I thumb up every video.
The voices are synthesized, not digitized.
Gorf on Vic-20 was my first game and my favorite out of all the carts I had at the time.
I Owned it for the Vic 20 as well and it was really good
Jamie released the source code to GORF a while back. GORF was written using TERSE which is based on the FORTH language, with some assembly for speed. I've been involved in some Gorf reverse engineering work, albeit not to a great extent.
Oh really? I didn't know that
I was playing this the other day on MAME. You went to the arcades because that's where the hardware was . Ports for home were invariably poor cousins albeit nice cousins you could play with. AFAIK those early 8 bit games were written in assembly language or even machine code . You can't explain those days to kids today - although my kids sort of get it.
One of my favorites! Showbiz Pizza standard, this became my quarter eater!
I used to love going there, that was the first place I saw it Dragon's lair
Me and brother hung out/worked there. He played Billy Bob for birthday parties some. We loved the place.
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries
At the time, it was an awesome game, regardless of the simplistic, and minimalistic rudimentary control scheme it utilized, and it still remains an awesome game to this day. However, when it was first available to play, the people standing around the cabinet to watch the gameplay could get fairly crowded. If I recall correctly, I believe that may have been the first time I saw a secondary monitor mounted atop of a game cabinet so more people could watch the gameplay. I think Showbiz Pizza hurt themselves by lowering the number of games they had in their arcade. It seems the quantity of game cabinets dipped down to approximately twenty percent of what they offered previously.
I remember seeing this back in the day and wondering just what in the world it was. I’d seen Vanguard in a laundromat, and the tiny amount of speech in that blew my mind. By comparison Gorf was like a book on tape!
I never played it, though. That first screen with the blue just does not work with my eyes. Everything gets lost and muddled in it, like I’m watching a slow motion seizure from inside my brain.
I wasn't aware how much speech was in the game until I did this video. You are right, there is a ton in their
I remember playing Gorf on out Vic 20 computer.
I had for my Vic 20 as well it was really good
Great game. People crowded around it in my neck of the woods because it was multiple games in one. And as always there were people that could play it endlessly.
That's why I always played it as well
Gorf was a great game. The multi game feature made it stand out, even if it was just cloning other games. I don’t recall any other games of that early era where a single quarter got you such a variety.
This was always my go to game when I was low on quarters just for the fact that I had four different games I could play
@@PatmanQC-Arcade-Documentaries Man, I was always low on quarters!
One of the greatest arcade games ever! Shame my home cabinet doesn't have it. Must download pronto! Great video by the way very interesting thank you.
Thanks for the nice word, glad you enjoyed it
I’ll never forget my parents got me ColecoVision for my birthday which came with Donkey Kong of course.. The other two games I got at first were Centipede(which I already was familiar with) and Gorf(which I requested because one of my neighbors said it was good..) I was surprised at just how good it was.. I was so in awe of the flag ship scene lol And the ranking system was a tremendous idea..
It was in retrospect like a greatest hits of shooters Galaga meets Space Invaders meets Gyruss..
Did you have the Roller Controller for Centipede? I think it came with a different game than Centipede, although logically one would think Centipede to be a leading contender for inclusion. I always wanted it, but I don't recall why I never acquired one. I had most of the other expansions for my Colecovision: Expansion Module #1 - The Atari 2600 adapter; Expansion Module #2 - driving controller with steering wheel & gas pedal; Expansion Module #3 - The Adam Computer; and I even had the Super Action Controllers which were a much superior controller than the originals just based upon the joystick alone. They also were suppose to have that Super Game Module I had plan on getting that was a different format of game storage than cartridge, and it could holder more data than the cartridges, and it also added RAM to the console, but if I recall correctly, I believe it was canceled, and replaced by the Adam Computer Module.
Correction the 5200 is analog control so it moves at whatever speed you want. As long as you have the actual analog joystick and a steady hand it might be better than the A800. Most plays use emulation on youtube so controles arent accurate. The player TB303 on CZcams has it if anyone wants to see. Only moves as fast as you move the stick.
Thx
OK.... I had NEVER even heard of this game until I saw your video here.... Now I actually have the game on the Defender 40th Anniversary arcade 1up..... So fricken cool!!!!
Fantastic, it's a lot of fun
One of my favorites!
Mine as well it's a classic
Me and my cousin use to wear this game out. We would ride on our bikes a few blocks away to the local bowling alley to play this game.
Sounds like me :-)
I owned this game at 14 years old. i could even get the big monsters that dance across the top.
Quite an interesting game this. Had lots of variety. Played this a lot as a kid.
So did I, it was a lot of fun
Thanks Pat!
Thanks for watching
Things I springboarded from this video, for subsequent Youtubing:
1: There's a video game called Space Chaser.
2: Ms. Gorf.
3: That the Vic-20 potentially had speech capabilities, albeit via an expansion. (I owned the infamous Superexpander.)
Footnote: The reason the Vic-20's graphics were chunky (and occasionally not) is because it had a limitation whereby the only way to achieve more than one color in a given 8x8 block was to reduce the horizontal resolution by half in that block. I bumped my head against this limitation on occasion when I was making little games in Basic as a punk.
Thanks for the technical info, I did not know that
There's a recent homebrewed port of Berzerk for the VIC that even uses speech called Berzerk MMX
@@scottbreon9448 Neat, hadn't known that. I checked it out. The voices in that game are definitely digital. Which is maybe even more impressive. Definitely no way that could be done on an unexpanded Vic20 without a cart.
This game was at the 1/2 Price Store when I was a kid. I can still hear it saying INSERT COIN!!
LOL
Had this for my c64, it was amazing
Yes it was
ALF stands for Alien Life Form. Great video! We had the 5200 version of Gorf.
You are correct, my bad. Thank you
"Long live go-erf!"
It's funny that there were and are SO many games that are very similar to Galaxians but they couldn't included one of those instead of "the" Galaxian to get around the Atari license.
Also one of the first games we had on the Vic-20, I'm not sure I would have noticed it in the arcade otherwise, I simply didn't see it around that often.
I think this game does pretty well for a multi-screen game; it's not really 5 (or 4) games in one like Tron, it's one control scheme with multiple styles of challenge. This kind of design represented more of the future of games, using the same abilities in different ways.
This was one of the first games for the Vic 20 I can recall getting. It was definitely innovative for its time.
Played this a whole lot in the winter of '81. Never could make it to the flagship though.
I did a few times but not very often
I found this in my orthodontist's office. I thought the speech was impressive but the game itself simple if difficult.
It was very innovative for its time
I loved this game back in the day. Good times.
It's definitely a classic
I had that Neo Geo sized cartridge for the COM VIC 20 also... Great times!!! I play it on mame now...
Gorf was my all time favorite. My highest score was 435000. There was a programmed trick on the Astro Battles. At space general level when the Invaders moved to the right move your ship to the left. Fire a shot and let it hit the top the Invaders on the top right would blow up. It was programmed into the game. It wouldn't work on levels 41,71,and 121.
That's awesome, I did not know that. That's a great high score as well
I don't recall Gorf at all. I was 1 or 2 when it came out, so by time I start going to arcades it likely had been cycled out for more popular games of the time. It's interesting see that this was the beginning of people trying shake up the formula of having a game do strictly one kind of thing repeatedly.
It was, back then people had to be innovative rather than just adding a bigger graphics card or more memory.
I loved this game when I was a schoolboy. Used to leave school for lunch and spend my lunch money on it in the local arcade. Even had the high score for a long while. I was always convinced there were some collision detection bugs though with unexplained player deaths.
It's always possible some early games had very bleak bugs
Gorf always seemed to give you value for money. If you knew where to sit for certain levels you could last quite a while. Thanks for this Space Cadet, all hail the supreme Gorfian Empire.
That's why I liked it, it seemed I could get four games for the price of one
I only ever remember seeing this game one time ever.
It was pretty popular here in the Midwest
Loved this game, one of the many that ate all my pocket money back in the day !
Fenton programmed GORF in FORTH and had even started work on GORF 2. Hopefully the source code can be duplicated and preserved even if Fenton claims the development system used doesn't currently exist... The source code could be cross compiled once recovered. Someone should contact Fenton for preservation efforts - Curious Marc might be the guy to help!
I had no Idea this was so influential. Cool game with a cool story!
I thought so as well
I wasn’t able to play it in the arcades, but thoroughly enjoyed it on my Atari VCS.
Very good conversion but I missed the voices