Chris Hecker - Biography

Biography

Hecker was a student at the Parsons School of Design in New York City, studying the fine arts towards work as an illustrator. An article in Byte Magazine sold him on programming and he dropped out of school to begin work on graphics and games.

Hecker worked at Microsoft for three years, where he created and led the WinG API project for the Windows operating system, a port of device independent bitmaps from Windows 95 to Windows 3.x. After completing WinG, Hecker moved to the entertainment division and wrote the rendering engine for the real-time globe display in Encarta World Atlas. He then left Microsoft in 1995 to start Definition Six, a Seattle, Washington based games and computer graphics consulting company that was later moved to Oakland, California.

Definition Six focused on the development of physics technology for games, and lobbied for the OpenGL standard for graphics display. The company produced a tech demo but did not ship a commercial title. During this time, Hecker spent many years working independently on a game based on the sport of rock climbing that was never completed.

In 2004, Hecker took a job with Maxis, working with Will Wright on Spore. He led the development of many of the key technologies in that title, including the core creature tesselation, painting, skinning, and animation technologies.

For many years Hecker was Editor-At-Large of Game Developer Magazine, and also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Graphics Tools. He currently sits on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference, and is the member with the longest tenure of those currently serving.

In 2006, Hecker was awarded the Community Contribution award at the Game Developers Choice Awards at the 2006 Game Developer Conference.

In late 2009, he was laid off from Maxis. Hecker is currently working on an "indie" game called SpyParty.