Resurrecting Midway’s Ms Gorf

Developed by Jamie Fenton of Dave Nutting Associates, Gorf was Midway’s biggest arcade hit since Gun Fight. A classic shooter that drew inspiration from other titles such as Space Invaders, Galaxian and Phoenix. GORF is an acronym for Galactic Orbiting Robot Force.

Released in February 1981, the game stood out with the addition of some interesting features like letting players buy extra lives per quarter for up to seven lives. It also became famous for its synthesized speech, a unique firing system called the “quark laser” which allows the player to cancel the previous shot if it misses, along with rankings that the player could achieve like Space Cadet and Space Avenger. Controls were provided by a unique (at the time) pistol grip controller with a trigger fire button built in (as per Tron) – designed by none other than George Gomez.

It was a package that landed well with distributors, arcade owners and the players themselves, resulting in a production run estimated at 25,000 cabinets.

Fenton went on record describing watching players smiling and continuously putting quarters into Gorf as “better than any drug I’ve ever taken”.

Gorf was a stone cold classic. Fenton’s follow up game later that year, was Robby Roto which sadly didn’t share similar success, and had a very short production run of less than 2,000 cabinets.

Midway’s next move was to develop a follow up to Gorf, tentatively titled Ms Gorf….

Sadly, fate would can the project…. As Jamie explains:

We worked on [Ms Gorf] for maybe a year, and I kept a video log of my progress. Eventually Midway decided to change to a new generation of hardware that wasn’t recordable, and all the progress stopped being captured, which is unfortunate because the game was cancelled. I drew a tombstone on the floppy disks with RIP and the date the game ended, and they’re now at the Computer History Museum [in Mountainview, California]. I still have the GORF source code disks.

So with the game cancelled, Jamie decided to keep the development disks and associated gear related to the game. She eventually donated that collection to a computer museum in California so it would be preserved.

Some time later, enthusiasts, with Jamie’s permission, imaged some of the 5¼″ floppies. Three of those images formed the nucleus of an idea to recreate the game — old school disks copied onto a computer so the bits wouldn’t rot. At first, the files looked like garbage. It appeared that every programmed bit was flipped — like reading a photo as its negative. Flip them back, and you can read words and pictures.

But then a madcap idea. What if Ms Gorf could be resurrected from the dead? Of course, it had to be done. Could this game be rebuilt, as true as possible to Fenton’s original vision, so that Ms Gorf could be played in 2026?

I spoke to UK enthusiast, MikeDX, who worked on the project about how they went about recreating the game:

In 1982, Jamie Fenton (the designer) was filmed playing a prototype of Ms Gorf, which is now on YouTube. We watched the film, frame by frame, and chopped out the gameplay. Almost every creature on the TV matched the sprites from our disks. Nice! The video also showed things the disks didn’t fully have: the score numbers, how fast you shoot, two sticks (one to move, one to aim), how the big “clone” alien blows up when you clear a round. Jamie even said out loud stuff like “about ten shots a second” and “two joysticks.” That became our homework list. So, the gameplay is basically everything we know from video and narrative provided by Jamie.

As Mike explained above, we do have some insight into this moment in time, as Jamie Fenton was interviewed on camera about the state of the videogame market. Shot in 1982 by a group of film makers for a show that never aired called Wired In, it is a fascinating insight into the mind of Jamie Fenton, just coming off of the disappointing performance of Robby Roto.

The whole video is worth a watch (especially Jamie’s visions for the future of videogames), but the key section for our purposes starts at 5:45 – Jamie actually plays a very early demo of the intended follow up to Gorf – Ms Gorf. Take a look:

You’ll notice the game (such as it was at that point in time) had no sound effects, and Jamie himself provides a voiceover – with riffed noises as he plays….

Refining the game required more work:

We even tracked blobs that we saw on the video, frame-by-frame to guess how fast things should move, instead of making numbers up out of thin air. We kept adding until it was fun: Waves of enemies. Shields. Mines. Sounds cut from the old tape – literally Jamie’s voice. We added support for gamepad and phone sticks. Scores and replays are online.

Remember earlier I mentioned that on the video above, there were no sound effects programmed to the game? Well, Mike and the team took it upon themselves to digitise the sounds that Jamie was making in the video and added them to the game! So the sound effects in the finished game, are all from Jamie’s voice.

So this is all great, but where is the game? The good news is its playable and you can play it right from your browser! Check it out on this link below:

PLAYABLE MS GORF ARCADE GAME

And its a pretty fun shooter – faithful to the prototype being played in the archived video as much as possible. I asked Mike about the future of the project:

If the missing game-logic disks from Jamie’s museum donation ever get imaged and shared, or if Jamie can find them from his own storage, we can try to rebuild the real Ms. Gorf.
Until then: play the remake, enjoy the art, and remember it’s a careful fan reconstruction!

I want to thank Mike for sharing all this info with me – and thanks to Jamie Fenton who had the foresight to save the old code!

Enjoy the game!

Thanks for checking in this week.

Tony