Format: ZX Spectrum 48K
Release: 1983
Publisher: Quicksilva
Developer: Sandy White

Today the survival horror genre may have been transformed by hardware advances, and the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but back in 1983 an art student from Edinburgh was already finding ways of fraying the nerves and raising pulses with nothing but a humble ZX Spectrum. Ant Attack marked the very beginnings of the survival horror genre, and a full year before Knight Lore was released it also became the first example of a game developed with the action viewed from an isometric perspective.

Today it's difficult to look at those shaded walls and tiny sprites without raising a supercilious smirk, but in its day, Ant Attack was the most terrifying experience you could have on a home computer. Armed with only a limited supply of grenades and with a severe time limit you had to sneak into the infested city of Antescher and rescue your trapped partner. Interestingly, 3D Ant Attack was also the first game to offer the choice of playing as either a boy or a girl.



However, 3D Ant Attack’s creator Sandy White wasn't your typical bedroom coder. He learned his trade from very different beginnings. “Before writing 3D Ant Attack I was studying at Edinburgh College of Art,” he reveals. “For much of that time I had been up to my elbows in plaster of Paris, ribbon cable, radio control servos and Christmas tree bulbs. At the end of ’82 I had my own one-man show which featured three storytelling computer-controlled sculptures, each based around the SC/MP chip that was in Sinclair’s first computer, the MK14 – that’s how I learned to program.”

By this time he had been truly bitten by the programming bug. A period on the dole gave White the extra incentive to turn his experiments into a living, breathing game world. The inspiration for the title, however, derived from an incongruous origin. “I had just seen Superman the movie, because the next thing I did was make a little sprite which flew over this weird random landscape, though as history tells, it never occurred to me to make a Superman game. At this stage I was still thinking about the sculptural possibilities. Later on it became apparent that there was a striking similarity between the isometric structures in Ant Attack and etchings by M C Escher; the city was eventually named Antescher in tribute.”



Although the buildings contained in the city were blocky, clearly defined structures were noticeable. Indeed, the church and graveyard were designed by White’s girlfriend at the time, Angela Sutherland, who went on to found Perfect Entertainment. Standing outside the gates of Antescher could be unnerving in itself. All would appear quiet and the city devoid of inhabitants. A jump command was included to enable the hero to scale certain edifices and cross the city’s threshold. Then the tension would begin to mount. It was possible to slowly make your way into the heart of the seemingly deserted city, but once a giant ant became alerted to your presence it wouldn’t take long for more to follow. Dispatching initial attacks was essential if your position was not to be overrun. Standing stranded and defenceless on a hill as more and more rapacious insects swelled the ranks of your attackers could be a truly disturbing experience.

The swarming routines were one of White’s first considerations: “I had this engine that drew cubes and did little else, so the first thing I had moving around was a cube. This became a black cube, then a black blob. Then it became a herd of black blobs. What had become interesting to me were the flocking properties that grew out of simple rules given to the blobs. They could be made to either seek or avoid a cube that you could control with the keyboard. I did at one point consider doing a sheep farming game. I bet that would have been a big seller.

“Anyway, eventually in went a couple of human characters, and because of a bug one of the blob sprites was drawn as a human and started to follow the other human. Ant Attack was born. The blobs got legs and it became a kind of hide and seek while avoiding the blobs-with-legs.”