
In 2002, with the help of a few friends, Hecker co-founded the successful Indie Game Jam. Lamenting the lack of innovation in gameplay, he has pushed for alternative markets and models for small-scale video game production. Hecker has lobbied heavily for the development of an independent games movement in many interviews and speaking engagements. In the summer of 1997, Hecker stepped down as author of the regular column to focus on game development full-time. The articles were part of a general push by Hecker to incorporate more interactive physics into games, which at the time in 1996 rarely featured any physical simulation.
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The second was a series on rigid body dynamics simulation for games, complete with an extensive bibliography of rigid body dynamics resources. The first series was the first complete synthesis of perspectively-correct texture mapping and formed the mathematical basis for many important game rasterizers, including Michael Abrash's rasterizer for the 3D title Quake. Two series of articles from this column still serve today as standard references on their respective subjects. From left: Rod Humble, Louis Castle, David Perry, Brenda Brathwaite, John Romero, Will Wright, Tim Schafer, Chris Hecker.ĭuring his time at Microsoft and Definition Six, Hecker wrote an influential programming column for Game Developer Magazine. Hecker and other game developers at a BAFTA event in Los Angeles in July 2011. Hecker was awarded the Community Contribution award at the 2006 Game Developers Conference. As of 2008, he was the longest serving advisor of the Game Developers Conference. 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. On December 4, 2013, Microsoft announced that Hecker's studio, Definition Six, was one of many indie game developers to join the Xbox program. Hecker was laid off from Maxis in late 2009, and is currently working on the "indie" game SpyParty, which was released as an early access title in 2018. This interpretation of the interview was discredited by Wright. Following Spore's release in late 2008, some players believed that comments Hecker had made in Seed Magazine indicated that he had been primarily responsible for the game's lack of hard scientific backing. 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. 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, and became a featured presentation at that conference. Hecker's research and development effort on Spore is widely regarded as a major step forward in procedural character animation and rendering. He led the development of many of the key technologies on Spore, including the core creature tessellation, painting, skinning, and animation technologies. In 2004, Hecker took a job with Maxis where he worked with Will Wright on what became the 2008 game Spore. He also spent several years working independently on a game based on rock climbing as a side project, though it was never completed. The company never actually shipped a commercial title, but did produce a tech demo. The company focused on the development of physics technology for games and lobbied for the OpenGL standard for graphics display. In 1995, Hecker left Microsoft to form his own company in Seattle, Definition Six, a games and computer graphics consulting company that was later moved to Oakland, California. 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.
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He worked there for three years, becoming creator and leader of the WinG API project for the Windows operating system. Hecker obtained a job at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington around 1992. He switched career tracks and dropped out of school to begin work on graphics and games. Along the way, he noticed an article in Byte Magazine about computer programming which piqued his interest. Hecker studied fine arts at Parsons School of Design in New York City, with the goal of becoming an illustrator.
