Ant Attack nearly went unpublished because Sinclair Research did not own a video recorder. Sandy White, a young sculptor from Edinburgh, had filmed his game running and posted the tape to Sinclair. After several months without a reply he rang the company, which told him it had not been able to watch the video. He sent a copy to Quicksilva instead. Quicksilva’s Mark Eyles told Sinclair User what happened next: “We received the tape and thought ‘So what’s new?’ We took it to a friend who had a video recorder and played it. We were amazed.” Quicksilva flew White down from Scotland, and the game was under contract within 24 hours.
What amazed them was a whole city drawn in solid-looking 3D on a 48K ZX Spectrum. The player walked, ran, jumped and climbed through the walled city of Antescher, and the view could be turned to look at it from four sides.
Fast facts
- Publisher: Quicksilva.
- Authors: Sandy White, with Angela Sutherland.
- Released: Christmas 1983, for the 48K Spectrum, at £6.95.
- Also sold as: 3D Ant Attack; CRASH reviewed it as Soft Solid 3D Ant Attack, after White’s “softsolid” technique.
- CRASH: 85%, issue 1, February 1984.
- Sales: 50,000 copies by the end of 1984, marked with a gold cassette.
- Conversion: Commodore 64, 1984, at £8.95.
- Follow-up: Zombie Zombie (1984).
The city of Antescher
The walled city of Antescher stands in the middle of a great desert, and giant ants have made it their home. Someone is trapped inside, and the player goes in to bring them out. Before the game starts the player chooses to be a boy or a girl, and the other becomes the one to be rescued. CRASH called it “a non-sexist program”. Looking back in 1990, ACE’s John Minson thought the choice made the game “almost unique”: “No stereotyping in Antescher.”
Minson also read a clue in the city’s name: “Take one part MC Escher, the artist whose mathematically precise drawings of impossible architecture reached cult status in the seventies, and one part fifties sci-fi movies like Them.”
The city is many times bigger than the screen and scrolls under the player. The player carries 20 grenades, thrown different distances with four keys, which stun or kill the ants, and can survive a number of bites before losing a life. Jumping on an ant paralyses it. The ants arrive within moments, and ACE found the best defence was to “climb the Lego walls of the city”, wait for a crowd to gather below and then throw grenades. When a building hid the player, four keys switched between four views of the same spot. CRASH compared it to “a scene in a TV studio where you can look at the action from four differently placed cameras”.
How the 3D worked
Ant Attack draws its city in an isometric view (see isometric projection): seen from above one corner, with nothing shrinking as it gets further away. CRASH used it in July 1984 as its example of why that suited a small computer:
With Isometric Perspective the programmer’s life is much easier because the scenery only has to be defined once as it doesn’t change shape physically during the game. Look at Ant Attack (Quicksilva) and you’ll see this exactly. The city is a large graphic over which the screen scrolls, so the only problem is the scrolling, the blocks of the city don’t have to be redefined with every movement.
The cost, the same article said, was that “the game can only be played from one height as it is only from a strictly fixed vantage point that the isometric perspective will work”. White’s four cameras were his answer to the other problem of the view: things hide behind other things.
White told Sinclair User he had done most of the work “on a 6502 system”, not the Spectrum’s Z80, and that unlike “programs like Zaxxon”, which were “to some degree machine-dependent”, his technique could run on any computer. He also applied for a patent on the display technique, “not for the games in which it is used”. Quicksilva’s advertisements marked Softsolid 3D “patent pending”.
A sculptor’s game
“Sandy White is a quiet Scot and a sculptor by trade,” CRASH began its review. “His understanding of three dimensional construction is evident in his game.” Computer & Video Games made him its designer of the month in May 1984. It gave his birth as Edinburgh, 1961, and reported that he had shown his sculpture in Aberdeen, and that his interest in computers went back six years to a Sinclair kit computer, the MK14: “I built my own computer to operate one of my working sculptures.”
White told the story of the game to Retro Gamer in 2004. As a “poor struggling artist” he had borrowed an Acorn Atom, and one of his first experiments drew isometric cubes on the screen at random. When the Atom went back to its owner, he found his family playing games on a new Spectrum and decided to write one. The first version flew a Superman sprite over a jumble of blocks, and “almost right up to the point where Ant Attack was complete, the tapes that it was saved onto were still labelled ‘Supman’.” The ants began as black blobs that followed the player between the bricks. White had called the game Ant Terror; “very likely Mark Eyles” at Quicksilva named it Ant Attack, and Eyles wrote the story on the inlay. White assembled the machine code by hand, without an assembler, and wrote the ending screen in BASIC in the last hours before the deadline.
Reception and sales
CRASH’s first issue, in February 1984, thought Ant Attack contained “the most breathtaking 3D graphics yet seen on the Spectrum”, and scored it 85%, with 100% for graphics. It had already been in the shops for Christmas: Personal Computer News’s chart for the first week of December 1983 had it at number 4. C&VG’s readers placed it third in the Best Original Game category of the Golden Joystick Awards for 1983.
By December 1984 the game had sold 50,000 copies, and Radio 1 disc jockey Annie Nightingale presented White and Sutherland with a gold cassette. Commodore Computing International reported that it was only the second game to be given one. By then Quicksilva had also released a Commodore 64 version at £8.95. Commodore User’s reviewer pointed out that there had been a lot of good games since the Spectrum original “made hardened games reviewers gasp”.
Zombie Zombie and after
White and Sutherland followed it with Zombie Zombie, published by Quicksilva on its Spaceman label in 1984 at £6.95. It used the same Softsolid 3D and the same four camera angles, but put the player in a helicopter above a city of zombies, able to pick up and drop blocks to rebuild the streets. The boy-or-girl choice came back too. CRASH gave it 80% in November 1984, and one reviewer called it “Ant Attack II”. White’s next game, I, of the Mask, came out on Electric Dreams, and Sinclair User’s review in January 1986 introduced him as “the programmer who wrote the magnificent classic Ant Attack”.
Was it the first?
Ant Attack is often called the first isometric game on a home computer. Wireframe said so in 2019: “in 1983 the first isometric game for home computers was published – Ant Attack, written by Sandy White.” In 1988 CRASH’s Will Brooker wrote that it had “wedged itself firmly into Spectrum history as the first game with truly three-dimensional views”. Neither is a period claim, and the earlier home versions of Zaxxon also used a diagonal view. What is clear from the dates is that Ant Attack reached the Spectrum a year before Ultimate’s Knight Lore, the game usually credited with making the isometric view the look of the Spectrum arcade adventure.
Sources
- Sinclair User, issue 21, December 1983, pp. 87–88: John Gilbert, “Sculpting the new shape of Spectrum games” (the video tape, Sinclair Research, Mark Eyles, the 6502, Zaxxon, the patent, boy or girl, four views).
- Personal Computer News, 7 December 1983: software chart.
- CRASH, issue 1, February 1984: review, 85% (the flight from Scotland, 20 grenades, four views, “non-sexist”).
- Computer & Video Games, issue 29, March 1984: Golden Joystick Awards results.
- Computer & Video Games, issue 31, May 1984: designer of the month, Sandy White.
- CRASH, issue 6, July 1984: feature on 3D techniques on the Spectrum.
- CRASH, issue 10, November 1984, pp. 139–140: Zombie Zombie review, 80%.
- Commodore Computing International, vol. 3 no. 6, December 1984: the gold cassette, 50,000 sales, the Commodore 64 version.
- Commodore User, December 1984: Commodore 64 version, £8.95.
- Quicksilva advertisement, Sinclair User, issue 33, December 1984: “From the authors of Ant Attack, Sandy White and Angela”, “Softsolid 3D, patent pending”.
- Sinclair User, issue 46, January 1986: I, of the Mask review.
- CRASH, issue 51, April 1988: Will Brooker, “Run It Again!”.
- ACE, issue 38, November 1990: John Minson, Hall of Fame.
- Retro Gamer, issue 5, 2004: “Empire of the Ants”, interview with Sandy White.
- Mark Vanstone, “Make an isometric game map”, Wireframe, issue 15, May 2019, p. 38.