Gorf is an arcade fixed shooter video game released in 1981 by Midway Manufacturing. It is a fixed shooter with five distinct levels, the first of which is based on Space Invaders and another on Galaxian. The game makes use of synthesized speech for the Gorfian robot which taunts the player, powered by a speech chip. Gorf allows the player to buy two additional lives per quarter before starting the game, for a maximum of seven lives.

The home ports omit the Galaxians stage because Japanese developer Namco (now Bandai Namco Entertainment) owns the rights to the franchise.

Gorf is a fixed shooter in which the player takes control of an unnamed starship from the Interstellar Space Force with a mission to prevent the Gorfian Empire from conquering Earth. The ship is capable of moving freely in all directions around the lower third of the screen under the control of a joystick. This was a departure from older vertically oriented linear shooters, including Space Invaders and Galaxian, which allowed only horizontal movement of the player's ship controlled by left and right buttons. At the time, the joystick input and two-dimensional movement were still unusual enough that contemporary video game guides noted them as distinctive features of Gorf.

Gameplay consists of five distinct missions; every mission presents its own unique playstyle, but the central goal of each is to destroy all enemies. Successfully completing all five missions loops the player back to the first mission and also increases the player's rank, which represents the current difficulty level of the game. Gameplay continues until the player loses all of their lives.

Before starting a new game, players can buy up to seven additional lives by purchasing more credits; an extra life is also granted after clearing the first five missions. Unlike similar games where the player can only shoot their weapon after an existing shot has disappeared from the screen, the ship is equipped with a laser cannon capable of firing a single vertical shot (called a "quark laser") at any time, although doing so causes the previous shot to disappear.

Players can advance through the ranks of Space Cadet, Space Captain, Space Colonel, Space General, Space Warrior and Space Avenger, which increases the speed and difficulty of the game and introduces more enemy patterns. Depending on the version, the player's current rank is displayed via a series of integrated lit panels on the cabinet.

Gorf was developed by Jamie Fenton of Dave Nutting Associates (DNA). DNA had become Research and development consultants for Midway Manufacturing at the beginning of the 1970s, and they had developed several arcade games such as Gun Fight (1975), a reworking of Taito's game Western Gun. Around this period, Nutting was working on a light gun-based game where the player would attempt to shoot a character he initially christened "Gorf". The game eventually developed into Desert Gun (1977).

Fenton had worked with DNA initially to work on pinball machines. She was a co-creator on some early arcade games such as The Amazing Maze Game (1976) and 280 ZZZAP (1977) and led the team who created an early video game console, the Bally Astrocade. Some of the custom integrated circuits for the system were manipulated and later re-used in Gorf. This included customized LSI Framebuffer chip sets. These chips allowed for Exclusive or writing of images which allowed objects on the screen to pass in front of or behind other objects and backgrounds.