"And above all the drama within it`s walls
the City of Antesher watches and watches
waiting for the next renaissance
and the next Golden Age..." Mark Eyles, 1983
the City of Antesher watches and watches
waiting for the next renaissance
and the next Golden Age..." Mark Eyles, 1983
f you need an incentive to start programming – here comes a nice one! These first steps are not much harder than all those boring "Hello World" apprentice pieces. But this rescue mission is a little adventure, an expedition into the realms of the first digital games and how they were made. We will wander through the merciless planes of data, searching for a lost city, a binary Angkor Wat, that is hidden not in a steaming jungle, but on 45 filigree feet of magnetic tape. Buried deep in code that was hand-written decades ago, in a language that even masters fear to speak, for a machine that present generations may never have heard of. If you accept this formidable dare, we will not only unveil and map this legendary structure. We will excavate it and elevate it to unseen beauty in a new dimension. This is a voyage to wisdom and the mastery of these magical machines. So, fellow adventurer, welcome to ...
Antesher is the name of the lost city in Ant Attack, the first 3D isometric, gender-aware Game. And boy (or girl) does it look gorgeous - like a collaboration between Mies van der Rohe and M.C. Esher; Bauhaus strictness meets impossible reality. For me, it is another first: Playable binary Art. No wonder that it blew everything else out of the water. Even decades later it is surrounded by mystery. This marvel is the work of Angela Sutherland, a young sculptor and girlfriend of Sandy White, the coding genius behind Ant Attack. One of the extremely rare photos of our lovebirds: Crash #11.
Games of that era were published mostly on audio-cassettes. If you want to know how an 80s game sounds: Here you go. Beware: it's loud and ugly, so you better turn the volume down before you click the link above. But how do we find the lost city in a four minute long screech? And even if it looks 3D on the telly, it's not. Ant Attack uses the isometric perspective - it's more or less a two dimensional picture that looks (and feels) spatial. So we do not only have to discover Antesher, we have to find a way to convert it to "real" 3D, so we can go places! All in all our expedition takes us from sound to binary to hexadecimal to decimal to 3D. And vice versa: We build a home in Antesher on the PC, transplant it back in the soundfile from the eighties and copy it to the original audiotape.
Crazy enough for you? Good! :)
Games of that era were published mostly on audio-cassettes. If you want to know how an 80s game sounds: Here you go. Beware: it's loud and ugly, so you better turn the volume down before you click the link above. But how do we find the lost city in a four minute long screech? And even if it looks 3D on the telly, it's not. Ant Attack uses the isometric perspective - it's more or less a two dimensional picture that looks (and feels) spatial. So we do not only have to discover Antesher, we have to find a way to convert it to "real" 3D, so we can go places! All in all our expedition takes us from sound to binary to hexadecimal to decimal to 3D. And vice versa: We build a home in Antesher on the PC, transplant it back in the soundfile from the eighties and copy it to the original audiotape.
Crazy enough for you? Good! :)