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Game Facts:

Gorgar was manufactured by Williams starting in December of 1979.  14,000 games were produced.  Gorgar was the first "talking" pinball machine with the awesome vocabulary of seven words!

More Gorgar Resources from Mark's Pinball Page:

  Gorgar  Photo Gallery
  Gorgar  Custom Instruction Cards
  Gorgar  Instruction Booklet (.pdf)

  System 6 MPU and Driver Board Information

 

My Gorgar Story:

As popular a game as Gorgar was back in the late 70's and eary 80's, I don't actually remember playing one back then! Since that was the era that I seemed to live in arcades (in my early 20s, no responsibilities!) , I must have stumbled over it at some point.  

I bought and restored this Gorgar as bonus to one of my employees who does remember playing it.  The game now resides outside of Hartford, CT.

This game found me, rather than the other way around.  The fellow that I had purchased one of my Road Kings from had restored a Gorgar in a similar fashion as I had with my Road Kings.  Buy two junkers and make one whole game out of them.  He didn't have any room to store "left overs" (I'm starting to accumulate a basement full of them!) so I bought the backbox (minus any boards, displays, transformer, etc), playfield (minus a bunch of plastics) and cabinet (minus the coin door) from him.  The playfield was in pretty sad shape, but not beyond restoration.  It was about 80% complete, missing 3 solenoids  and a bunch of switches.  Fortunately, the person who removed the parts cut off the wiring right at the connection, so it didn't require massive rewiring.

I stripped the playfield and  tossed all of the metal parts into the tumbler to clean them.  The playfield had a good deal of wear around all of the inserts (see below):

 

 

Here is a shot of the same area after a good cleaning, some touch-up paint and several coats of wax:

I went on an Internet scavenger hunt for parts and located a coin door, drop target hardware and the missing plastics.  I raided one of the Firepower's that is sitting in my "to-do" queue and got a transformer and related power supply parts and the displays and display driver.  I had a "funky" system 6A board that I had removed from a Firepower, so I rebuilt that board and burned a new set of ROMs for Gorgar.  Another Firepower I had bought at the Allentown show supposedly didn't have any boards in it, but when I opened the head to get the transformer out, it had a nice driver board, so that got thrown into the mix.  The only thing missing was a sound/speech board and I pulled the one from the Blackout I just bought.  Call this the Frankenstein pinball machine!   New rubbers and #47 bulbs all around finished the game up nicely.

The backglass came from Mayfair.  Its not a repro or NOS, but they had one that's between and 7 and 8 in quality.

Gorgar Photo Gallery:

Side View of the Game:

Front View of the Game:

Playfield Upper Right:

Playfield Upper left:

Lower Playfield:

And finally, Gorgar's New Home:

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