The History & Games of Sandy White: The Architectural Gamer

[@RoseTintedSpectrum]

Are you a fan of Sandy? A nay-sayer? Regardless, which games resonated with you?

[@alfreomega]

I'm a fan of course. I was always fascinated by the sound effect that plays in Ant Attack when you awaken your rescuee and they declare "take me away from all this". I thought it was some original piece of digital muzak Sandy had composed. I had chance to ask him it about it and it turns out it is supposed to be a theme from a popular piece of classical music. I told him the pitch and tempo were all wrong which is why I didn't recognize it. Anybody else know what it is or was it just me?

[@andrewwood1035]

Not just you! Played this yesterday and thought it sounded like an off-brand version of Tchaikovsky's Love Theme from 'Romeo & Juliet'

[@AlessandroGrussu]

I completed Ant Attack for the first time in 1985. Admittedly, the controls were rather difficult to master, but I guess White went with what he honestly believed to be the best since at the time of release there was practically nothing to get inspiration from. In the answers to his website's guestbook, White tells some interesting stories about the game. For instance, he replied to me, 20 years ago (!), that by placing an AM radio beside the Spectrum while running Ant Attack, you can tune it to the RF produced by the Z80 chip and the circuit board, so you can actually hear the program executing, and that he used this method for debugging the code sometimes. By listening to the sound of the code executing, he was, for example, able to understand where it had got stuck if it crashed. About at the same time I came across a modification of Ant Attack done by a Mr Tyrone C. who established a website dedicated to hacking the game. He devised a new keyboard pattern which makes the game much easier to control on both real hardware and a PC keyboard under emulation. You can download it from: disegnareconlaluce (dot) altervista (dot) org (slash) AntAttackKeysHack (dot) zip - click on "qui" if you the Altervista message comes up.

[@RoseTintedSpectrum]

Excellent! Honestly, there was a tonne of little bits of information here and there that I kept cropping up on around Sandy. He really had a fantastic thought process toward games design and programming.

[@ItsCrapContent]

Very cool and brill episode....all his work was impressive for time and still is ..👍

[@AllOuttaBubblegum123]

Ant Attack has a huge place in my heart. Exploring the city in 3D was all so new at the time. I would spend hours just doing that. Plus, them bloody Ants are terrifying. P.S. for some reason, I'd always thought Sandy White was a lady, so thanks for the enlightenment.

[@gwishart]

A few years ago I came across a version Ant Attack with much improved controls in a massive box of tapes from a car boot sale. It's on side-B of the original tape, with a label saying "keyboard hack", don't know if it's something that came from a magazine type-in, a bootleg re-release or just the results of the previous owner's own hacking. Keys Q,A,L, P immediately move your player in the appropriate direction, and the viewpoint controls have been changed to 2,3,4,5. The original forward and rotate controls are still in place too, but the rotate keys are now N,M - perhaps to make it easier to play on the Spectrum+ and 128k models. The difference in playability is remarkable (particularly in situations where you can't see the player character), and makes the original rotate/forward controls look very clunky by comparison. Although I suppose at the time, there wasn't really an established control scheme for isometric movement in games, so I can understand why Sandy picked that method. Great video by the way!

[@RoseTintedSpectrum]

Interesting! And yes, controls in the 80s were yet uniform, and this being a game unlike most others, it was a double whammy.

[@B3tanTyronne]

One of the truly great speccy coders, it was nice to find my message to Sandy on his website from the 21/11/20 and the reply I got from him, I was 27 when I sent that message, and I am now 48, yet I still to this day appreciate what he created.

[@JimBlimey]

An in-depth look at a real pioneer of the time who is perhaps often overlooked.. Lovely stuff!

[@hazy33]

Ant Attack. For something so revolutionary it's amazing how it had absolutely zero impact on games that followed.

[@martinr3993]

Really good vid, thank you. AA and ZZ both gave me the heebie-jeebies because the controls were so horrendous that being anywhere near an enemy meant certain death. The amazing thing about ZZ though is that the player got to change the game’s landscape. I can’t think of any other Spectrum game that let you do that.

[@MoreFunMakingIt]

Excellent stuff! I really enjoyed that and learned so much that younger me had missed when all this happened. The second and third game for instance! I had no idea they existed! Ant attack will always hold a dear place in my heart. There aren't too many moments that you can put your finger on and say "my expectations changed from this point because of this", and this was certainly one of those times. It's really hard to recall the exact feelings but I can certainly remember there being a big fuss over this game within my group of gaming friends. I can also remember being frustrated with the controls, which has certainly stuck with me to this day. I fired it up on my new +2 128k the other day and was baffled as to how you were even supposed to move, and then accidentally rotating the map didn't really help. Ill give the other two a look next time I have a chance. Thank you for this video.

[@stevewilliamson1971]

Great episode as always mate.

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

That was brilliant work Rosie! I remember seeing Ant Attack as a kid and being absolutely fascinated by it. Zombie Zombie looks intriguing... I think the Zombies die if they fall off a 2 block height, whereas you die if you fall off a THREE block height. I Of The Mask always reminded me a bit of The Sentinel as that looked weird in a good way. Excellent, informative, honest, fair, amusing and inspiring. Kudos!

[@AllOuttaBubblegum123]

That first-time feeling of exploring a 3D city was really special. The terrible controls just made the panic levels rise even higher, lol.

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

@@AllOuttaBubblegum123Yeah... and the brilliance/confusion of rotating the camera around!

[@zxrenew5642]

Nice one, I enjoyed that, You missed a trick on the zombie zombie music though. ;)

[@mlucifersam]

I thought the same. One of the 1st games EVER on the Spectrum to simulate 2 channel music. Was amazing to hear at the time

[@SpectrumNez]

Excellent video. Ant Attack was a game I played at a neighbours house and it absolutely blew me away. We played it for hours and hours, until he got a bit cheeky and his Mum slapped him across the face. I then had to wait to get my own copy because I was too scared to visit after that. I’d love to see a slightly modernised version of it with actual usable controls.

[@Quimbyrbg]

I've never played Any Attack, but loved reading about it (and Lords of Midnight) in an old Retro Gamer magazine. Those two titles really stood out to me as having an uncanny ability to exceed my expectations for what that kind of machine could possibly run. I only read a tiny excerpt about Zombie Zombie, and never heard of I, so this was a particularly interesting video. Next time I play Minecraft, I'm going to lure a zombie off a stairway to nowhere.

[@jameswhitwell9156]

I was gripped from start to finish. Great documentary sir!

[@RoseTintedSpectrum]

Lovely to hear James, thank you!

[@RufianEmbozado]

This absolutely proves what a clever bastard you are. Ant Attack was like see someone cheating and thimk: "I never thougt this could be a move". I really didn't get into Zombie Zombie (never paid attention to the "bottles" cue, too subtle to me) and I Of The Mask was so weird you had to spend time with it. Just a great "out of the box" career!

[@LockFarm]

Wonderful review/thing - thanks for putting this together.

[@billybollockhead5628]

I had 3D Ant Attack on a pirate cassette... with no instructions.. Could never figure out how to play it as a kid - seeing the controls now, im not surprised.. That's some awesome copy protection there.. requiring the manual to know what keys do what... I had never even heard of the other 2 - i need to hand in my speccy nerd card.

[@MrHarbonaut]

Nice editing there! I remember when we were chatting about games the first time I couldn't remember Sandy's name.

[@RoseTintedSpectrum]

Yes! I think we both remembered after the fact!

[@gileswhiteheadartist]

Really interesting to find out more about Sandy White - clearly a very clever chap! Strange that, despite being an avid Spectrum fan, I’d never heard of Zombie Zombie or I of the Mask. I do remember enjoying Ant Attack, but I never really felt the need to complete it unlike Manic Miner or Penetrator which I played endlessly (and did complete😀)Thanks for the upload - great stuff!

[@KingSidJames]

I recall exactly when I played Ant Attack. A rainy sunday afternoon, in a gloomy mood (School was looming) on the 48k in my bedroom, in front of my tiny Pye portable TV. I was midway through exploring an other Malcolm tape with no idea what games were copied on its TDK branded goodness. Ant Attack was not a favourite game, but it was distinctive. Also it stuck out in the brain pan due to something called Pat Pending listed on the loading screen. At the age of 6 and without the power of Google, my tiny brain equated this bizarre phrase with the chance that Post Man Pat was in the game. Like most good speccy games, your given just enough that your imagination fills-in the blanks. I remember seeing the abandoned city and hearing the wind blowing through the empty buildings.

[@flatduckrecords]

Wonderful, thank you. Ant Attack was one of my first games and I can remember it really firing my imagination as a kid. It’s hard to hold onto the memory of a feeling, but every now and then I can still recall that exact sense of fear, excitement and mystery. It was certainly the first game with which I ever felt an emotional connection. In fact, I happened to see a modern 3D render of the city the other day, and I discovered you can zoom in to a sort of first person perspective and kind of wander round. Honestly, I had shivers up my spine.

[@8-bitsteve500]

Great video! I was a bit of a fan of Quicksilva games (loved their box artwork) so bought 3D Ant Attack blindly and from the moment it loaded I was utterly blown away. I loved the game and played it so much that it was the first Spectrum game I ever completed (without cheating) and to this day I have very fond memories of it. Thank you Sandy!

[@DaglessTV]

Excellent video, mate.

[@siriusmicromaniac]

I loved AA but never saw the other two games, the 3D environment in IOTM looks incredible for something running on a Spectrum. Sorry, but I am going to be that pedant and say there is an obvious earlier candidate for the Survival Horror genre, namely 3D Monster Maze on the ZX81, and if you want to stretch it even further there are a host of classic text adventure games which see you trying to avoid being killed by everything from vampires (The Count) to Grues (Zork). Great video, thanks.

[@steve16384]

Another great vid. Now can we all agree that SU was the only mag worth reading? 😂

[@michael.almond]

Great video. Lovely stuff.

[@spazkong]

I can't find the official website :(

[@GraciousBears]

Me and Ross.... in the living room...... watching a documentary about ANTS

[@WojciechPietrzok]

Wait a moment! Ant Attack allows you to select your gender? You want to say that this whole "woke agenda ruining games" started in early 80s? Madness, utter madness! On a more serious note, it's astonishing to see such a technical marvels on a humble speccy. Even if it's hard to tell if they were more a games, or more an interactive demoscene art pieces.

[@hellsong23]

Played Ant Attack. Not played Zombie Zombie. And I of the Mask played me.

[@casanovafunkenstein5090]

I, Of The Mask doesn't necessarily look like it's impossible to get a grip of. I think that the main issue is not getting the right order to collect the bits clarified and that the rendered viewport consistently makes it look like there are paths to the left and right that don't exist. It's not intuitive, but I do see what they were going for with you needing to set your direction in advance of the turn based on the map and not the 3D view. Honestly, I'd love to see it reimagined with similar low poly, dithered graphics but with a bit more to do. It could be a really interesting dungeon crawler but I sense that system limitations precluded it from being more complex than a maze with colour coded sectors that needed to be done in order. It's probably absolutely unplayable for people who are colourblind, so any modern reinterpretation would need to be a bit more graphically diverse between areas but it is genuinely intriguing on some level. I'm split on the controls, as a more modern control method could be a means of making the game easier to navigate and could do a lot of good in terms of showing off any new landmarks or adding verticality to the game, but I do also kinda like the way that it pre-empts something like Killer 7 and its linear paths with junction points and I don't think it would feel so unique otherwise. Maybe there's a fun rail shooter/dungeon crawling hybrid game where you swap between combat/interaction mode (where you stand still in a first person view and move a cursor around) and a movement/exploration (where you need to be quick to set your direction and prevent yourself from running into walls and potentially getting menaced by monsters hiding behind corners) . It's probably a case where you can see the potential, but the actual content is less exciting than the actual game itself.

[@toastedfallenstar584]

Had ant attack, only saw zombie zombie for sale once and bought it but it never worked. Never saw i of the mask whatsoever.

[@AstAMoore]

Oddly enough, I played _I, of the Mask_ the most. Not because it was a great game-it wasn’t-but I really enjoyed looking at the graphics. _Ant Attack_ on the other hand, felt too difficult. Never played _Zombie Zombie_ for some reason.

[@robm8809]

"There is a way of entering the third hole..." Fnarr, fnarr! Sorry! No, not sorry, sorry.

[@50factsabout]

Bobbins lol.... someone clearly has been hanging out with Sarah :)

[@Lbf5677]

You wouldn't come second to ah diddums

[@burbercat3558]

I've never read an inlay card. I mean what kind of psycho does that??

[@paulrowe3250]

Your lucky you got zombie zombie to load bloody hype load thing 😡

[@jamesragsdale3069]

I played this on DOS. It's not fun. It's so awful. So fucking bad.

[@strawman3030]

Fantastic video