Sandy White
The sculptor who built a computer to move a sculpture, then wrote the first isometric Spectrum game
Sandy White came to programming sideways — an art-college graduate who built a Sinclair MK14 to drive a working sculpture, then wrote Ant Attack for Quicksilva in 1983 and gave the Spectrum isometric 3D a year before Knight Lore. He was openly wary of what the games industry would do to him.
Sandy White wrote Ant Attack, the game that put isometric 3D on the ZX Spectrum in 1983 — a year before Knight Lore, which usually gets the credit.
He is one of the clearest cases in the British 8-bit era of somebody arriving at games from somewhere else entirely, and it shows in the work.
How he got there
Computer & Video Games made him Designer of the Month in May 1984 and printed the route.
Born in Edinburgh in 1961. Art-college degree, then a solo show of his own sculpture in Aberdeen. Two years after that he wrote Ant Attack.
The computing came out of the sculpture rather than alongside it. His interest went back six years to a Sinclair MK14 — the kit micro from Science of Cambridge, Sinclair’s pre-Sinclair Research company — bought for a specific job. In his own words: “I built my own computer to operate one of my working sculptures — the ice cream van — which is a protest against nuclear war.”
So: a man who taught himself machine code to animate an anti-nuclear ice cream van, and who then applied a sculptor’s understanding of three-dimensional construction to a machine that could not do perspective.
CRASH saw the connection immediately. Reviewing Ant Attack in its first issue, February 1984: “Sandy White is a quiet Scot and a sculptor by trade. His understanding of three dimensional construction is evident in his game, Ant Attack.”
What he was worried about
The C&VG profile is unusual for the period in that the subject is visibly uncomfortable with the machinery around him.
He would not discuss money. “Quicksilva warned me that people would ask how much I’ve earned,” he told the magazine, and left it there — Ant Attack was on its way to 50,000 copies at the time.
And on the future, in May 1984, with one hit behind him and a second game agreed: he was concerned that business pressures might at some stage threaten his artistic integrity.
That is a strikingly clear-eyed thing for a 23-year-old to say in the middle of the British software boom, and it is worth setting beside the more familiar bedroom-coder story, in which the money arriving is the happy ending.
Sculpture remained the important thing. He was still exhibiting; the games were what the computer turned out to also be good for.
Fast facts
- Born: Edinburgh, 1961
- Trained as: a sculptor; art-college degree, solo show in Aberdeen
- First computer: a Sinclair MK14, bought to drive a sculpture
- Known for: Ant Attack (Quicksilva, 1983), with Angela Sutherland — the two of them received a “gold cassette” for 50,000 sales in December 1984
- Ambition, as given to C&VG in 1984: to travel in the Space Shuttle