Chris Hecker

Hecker studied fine arts at Parsons School of Design in New York City, with the goal of becoming an illustrator. Along the way, he noticed an article in Byte Magazine about computer programming which piqued his interest. He switched career tracks and dropped out of school to begin work on graphics and games.

Hecker obtained a job at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington around 1992. He worked there for three years, becoming creator and leader of the WinG API project for the Windows operating system. After completing WinG, he moved to Microsoft's entertainment division where he wrote the rendering engine for the real-time globe display in the Encarta World Atlas. In 1995, Hecker left Microsoft to form his own company in Seattle, Definition Six,[2] a games and computer graphics consulting company that was later moved to Oakland, California. The company focused on the development of physics technology for games[3] and lobbied for the OpenGL standard for graphics display.[4] The company never actually shipped a commercial title, but did produce a tech demo.[5] He also spent several years working independently on a game based on rock climbing as a side project,[6][7] though it was never completed.

In 2004, Hecker took a job with Maxis where he worked with Will Wright on what became the 2008 game Spore.[8][9] He led the development of many of the key technologies on Spore, including the core creature tessellation, painting, skinning, and animation technologies. Hecker's research and development effort on Spore is widely regarded as a major step forward in procedural character animation and rendering. Part of the technology he developed while working on the project was later selected for publication in the SIGGRAPH 2008 Transactions on Graphics conference proceedings,[10] and became a featured presentation at that conference.[11] Wright later claimed in an interview that Hecker's work on Spore had advanced the state of the art in procedural animation by several years.[12] Following Spore's release in late 2008, some players believed that comments Hecker had made in Seed Magazine[13] indicated that he had been primarily responsible for the game's lack of hard scientific backing.[14] This interpretation of the interview was discredited by Wright.[15] and Spore producer Lucy Bradshaw.[16] Hecker was laid off from Maxis in late 2009,[1] and is currently working on the "indie" game SpyParty. On December 4, 2013, Microsoft announced that Hecker's studio, Definition Six, was one of many indie game developers to join the ID@Xbox program.

Hecker's other side projects have included acting as editor of Game Developer Magazine and serving on the editorial board for the Journal of Graphics Tools.[17] As of 2008, he was the longest serving advisor of the Game Developers Conference.[18] Hecker was awarded the Community Contribution award at the 2006 Game Developers Conference.[19][20]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chris Hecker.

• Chris Hecker's web page