Before he wrote a game, Sandy White was building sculptures that moved. At Edinburgh College of Art he wired microprocessors into what he later called “miniature operas”: for his degree show he wrote a five-minute piece of music with a little story, and light bulbs as actors on a small set that moved in time to it. His lecturers, he told Your Spectrum in 1984, were quick to tell him that his electronic “story-telling” gizmos were not art. A few months after leaving, he wrote Ant Attack, which put a whole city in isometric 3D on the 48K ZX Spectrum at Christmas 1983, a year before Ultimate’s Knight Lore.
Fast facts
- Born: Edinburgh. Computer & Video Games gave the year as 1961; Sinclair User and Your Spectrum both called him 23 at the turn of 1983–84, which would make it 1960.
- Trained as: a sculptor, at Edinburgh College of Art; a one-man show in Aberdeen after graduating.
- First computer: a Sinclair MK14 kit, which he built into a sculpture.
- Games: Ant Attack (Quicksilva, 1983) and Zombie Zombie (Quicksilva, 1984), both with Angela Sutherland; I, of the Mask (Electric Dreams, 1985). Dick Special, for the Amiga, was never released.
- Gold cassette: for 50,000 sales of Ant Attack, presented to White and Sutherland in December 1984.
Sculpture with circuit boards
White went to school near Falkirk, where pupils who were good at maths were allowed to send off punched cards to the local technical college’s computer and wait two weeks for the results. He was, he said, too bad at maths to get much time on it. Art came easily: his father was an art teacher. Before art college he had built a TV tennis game from a hobbyist chip, and when he heard about Sinclair’s MK14 he ordered one at £39.99 and waited six months for it to arrive.
The MK14 went into the work. Computer & Video Games, making him its Designer of the Month in May 1984, quoted him: “I built my own computer to operate one of my working sculptures — the ice cream van — which is a protest against nuclear war.” His most recent piece by then, he said, was “about a happy little robot — there is no particular message — I was just feeling quite happy at the time.”
Ant Attack
After his degree he planned to be a full-time artist, and had a one-man show in Aberdeen. That same summer he started writing Ant Attack. A local businessman had asked him to write some code and lent him an Acorn Atom. Drawing cubes in BASIC and scattering them in a loop, he saw them stack up on each other “like Lego bricks thrown on the floor”, and adjusted the code until cities appeared. Sinclair User reported that the technique was finalised on his brother’s Spectrum, and White told it that he had done most of the work “on a 6502 system”, the Atom’s processor, not the Spectrum’s Z80.
He did not develop on the Spectrum itself. White wired a Dataman “Softy”, an EPROM emulator with 4K of memory, into the back of the machine, which meant the whole game, apart from the city data and some BASIC for the scoring screens, had to fit in 4K. He had never heard of an assembler, so he wrote the mnemonics on sheets of A4, worked out the opcodes by hand in the margin, and recalculated every jump whenever he inserted a line. Your Spectrum put the programming at 15 weeks. Angela Sutherland, his girlfriend at the time, designed much of the city of Antescher and its characters; White later said he could not tell the story of those games “without it being about two people, not one.”
He sent a videotape of the game to Sinclair Research first, partly so that nobody could take his code. It came back, he told Your Spectrum, because Sinclair had no video recorder to watch it on. Quicksilva took more persuading on the phone, but once it had seen the tape it flew him from Scotland to Southampton and signed him within a day. CRASH’s first review began: “Sandy White is a quiet Scot and a sculptor by trade. His understanding of three dimensional construction is evident in his game, Ant Attack.” The game’s own story is told in its entry.
Wary of the business
The C&VG profile caught him uneasy about the trade he had walked into. “Quicksilva warned me that people would ask how much I’ve earned,” he said, and would say no more. He had agreed to write another game for Quicksilva, but the magazine reported his concern that business pressures might, at some stage in the future, threaten his artistic integrity. His stated ambition was to travel in the Space Shuttle.
Zombie Zombie, I of the Mask and Dick Special
Zombie Zombie (1984) reused the Softsolid engine and put the player in a helicopter over a city of zombies, able to pick up and drop blocks to build new structures. Looking back in 2013, White called it a compromise: he had been exhausted by the first game and his self-adjusting difficulty “just didn’t work”.
I, of the Mask (1985) went to Electric Dreams, set up by Rod Cousens after he left Quicksilva. It drew solid 3D corridors on the Spectrum, rendered straight to the screen from top to bottom rather than into a hidden buffer, at around 100 polygons a second by White’s estimate. He called it “one of the cleverest bits of code I’ve ever written”, and admitted that, having watched someone complete it on YouTube, he still did not really know what was going on.
His last project of the decade, Dick Special, began on the Spectrum and moved to the Amiga. It was a detective story with large animated characters, which he animated by building a puppet rig to capture their movement. Telecomsoft, the publisher behind Firebird and Rainbird, cancelled it, and White remembered the industry of the time as “a hell of a lot of politics”. Sutherland, who was producing it, later produced the Discworld adventure games at Perfect Entertainment.
After games
Around 1994 White worked on hardware again for Psygnosis, on its PlayStation development system. Thinking about how to make characters move realistically, he built a motion-capture suit and had a ragdoll physics engine running on a Pentium by late 1994. Psygnosis funded more work on it, but no studio he showed it to wanted it.
He has since told the story of Ant Attack at length, to Edge in 2000 and to Retro Gamer in 2004 and 2013. In the 2013 interview, living in Scotland and newly a father, he said he collected old computers and had “become a living museum piece”.
Sources
- Sinclair User, issue 21, December 1983, pp. 87–88: John Gilbert, “Sculpting the new shape of Spectrum games” (age 23, his brother’s Spectrum, the 6502, the patent application, Mark Eyles, the flight to Southampton).
- CRASH, issue 1, February 1984: Ant Attack review (“a quiet Scot and a sculptor by trade”).
- Your Spectrum, issue 2, March 1984, p. 50: “Anterview” (degree in sculpture, Edinburgh College of Art, “story-telling” gizmos, the Acorn Atom, 15 weeks of programming, Angela Sutherland’s design, the tape sent to Sinclair Research, age 23).
- Computer & Video Games, issue 31, May 1984: Designer of the Month (born Edinburgh 1961, the Aberdeen show, the MK14 and the ice cream van, earnings, artistic integrity, the Space Shuttle).
- Commodore Computing International, vol. 3 no. 6, December 1984, p. 33: the gold cassette for Sandy White and Angela Sutherland.
- Edge, issue 92, Christmas 2000, pp. 142–145: “The making of 3D Ant Attack” (the Softy and 4K, hand assembly, the tape to Sinclair, Angela Sutherland and Perfect Entertainment).
- Retro Gamer, issue 119, October 2013, pp. 90–95: Paul Drury, “In the Chair: Sandy White” (school, the MK14, the degree show, the Atom, the Softy, Zombie Zombie, I, of the Mask, Dick Special, Psygnosis).
- Wikipedia, “Perfect Entertainment” (web, secondary): Angela Sutherland’s Teeny Weeny Games merged with Perfect 10 Productions to form Perfect Entertainment in 1995; she produced Discworld. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Entertainment