ABOUT
Tom Cahill, former Service Manager for Williams, told us that Williams' 1978 'Disco Fever' was the first game Williams engineered to have speech and a talking prototype of that game was presented at the Chicago AMOA show. That must have been the 1978 AMOA Expo mentioned in Cash Box Nov-24-1979, page 53, where a Williams representative at the 1979 Expo stated, "last year we had a prototype model of a talking pinball machine on display."
Per Cash Box, Oct-13-1979, page 58, 'Gorgar' was being prototyped during production of Time Warp.
Williams unveiled 'Gorgar' to great attention at the 1979 AMOA Expo held November 8-11, 1979 in Chicago. The afore-mentioned Williams representative stated these were production models at this show. We note that Kordek's Production Start Date (shown below) is two weeks later but we have found that his Start Dates will exclude sample runs while his quantities include sample runs. It would make sense that Sample games were presented at this show.
'Gorgar' was their first talking pinball machine commercially released and the first one from any manufacturer. It had a vocabulary of seven words and had a heart beat sound that would speed up during longer game play.
According to an article in Amusement Review (Jan/Feb 1980, page 6), the talking feature was optional at an additional cost of $70 to the operator and was ordered on the great majority of the machines.
For several Williams games (especially before 1987), Speech Processing was a separate task than Software Programming and may have been done by a different person than whom we list as having done the Software. Paul Dussault did the Speech Processing for this game.
No Production Floor Records available for Gorgar.
From Steve Kordek Lists #3 and #11:
Production Start Date: Nov-28-1979
Production End Date: Mar-14-1980
Total quantity produced: 14,000
Product History Record for Gorgar:
Quantity produced for USA/Canada: 8924*
Quantity produced for export: 5394*
Total quantity produced: 14318*
Price to Distributor: $1449.00
*These quantities may be sales estimates.
Compare Gorgar's physical stance as depicted on the lower playfield with the 1978 artwork, In the Underworld, by Boris Vallejo.
IMAGES
Images via IPDB.org
Pinside ID217
Manufactured ByWilliams Electronic Games, Inc.
DateJanuary 1979
TypeSS
IPDB ID1062
Players4
HIGH SCORES
PINTIPS
Spinner is lit after scoring 10 bonus (and unlit after scoring 20).
Snake pit is highest value single shot. Max value is 50k. Resets its value if lit for 20k or higher. Increase value by dropping GOR targets.
1-2-3-4 will light the pit for 50K immediately. This is a OK if lit up in any order, but not recommended if you have to do them in order.