Gorf

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.

Gorf's most notable feature is its robotic synthesised speech, powered by the Votrax speech chip. One of the first games to allow the player to buy additional lives before starting the game, Gorf 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.