When Ants Attacked

Sometime in late 1983 the owners of Sinclair Spectrum home computers in Europe were witnesses to the debut of the first true isometric 3D computer game - Ant Attack. The game was simply a revelation! The author, Sandy White, has a page up about the Making Of of Ant Attack, and there you can also play the game in a Java Spectrum emulator. The page took me right back to my mis-spent childhood and I distinctly remember the first time I was loading up Ant Attack and how the 3D environment of the game fascinated me.

There it was! The tiny Spectrum suddenly contained a three-dimensional world you could run around in. This was so different from all the 2D platform games of the time and was certainly an inspiration for me to stick with programming as a life choice.

The page is also interesting as it shows how Sandy programmed the game - handwritten and hand-assembled machine code on a notepad! Those were the days, indeed.