Chris Hecker
Encyclopedia
Biography
Hecker was a student at the Parsons School of Design in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, 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
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
for three years, where he created and led the WinG
WinG
In computing, WinG is an application programming interface that provides faster graphics performance on Windows 3.x operating environments, and was positioned as a way to help game developers more easily port their DOS games to Microsoft Windows...
API project for the Windows operating system. The success of WinG in allowing game development on Windows led directly to the inception of DirectX
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...
, the now-standard game development platform for Windows.
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
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...
based games and computer graphics consulting company that was later moved to Oakland, California
Oakland, California
Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724...
.
Definition Six focused on the development of physics technology for games, and lobbied for the OpenGL
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
standard for graphics display. The company produced a tech demo http://www.d6.com/games/index.htm 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
Rock climbing
Rock climbing also lightly called 'The Gravity Game', is a sport in which participants climb up, down or across natural rock formations or artificial rock walls. The goal is to reach the summit of a formation or the endpoint of a pre-defined route without falling...
that was never completed.
In 2004, Hecker took a job with Maxis
Maxis
Maxis is an American company founded as an independent video game developer in 1987. It is currently a subsidiary of Electronic Arts . Maxis is the creator of one of the best-selling computer games of all time, The Sims and its first sequel, The Sims 2...
, working with Will Wright on Spore
Spore (2008 video game)
Spore is a multi-genre single-player god game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. The game was released for the Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems in September 2008 as 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
Game Developer Magazine
Game Developer magazine is the premier publication for working video game creators, and reaches over 35,000 industry professionals monthly. Each month, industry leaders and experts share technical solutions, review new game development tools, and discuss strategies for creating innovative,...
, and also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Graphics Tools
Journal of Graphics Tools
The Journal of Graphics Tools, abbreviated jgt, is a peer-reviewed research journal that focuses on computer graphics. It has been published quarterly by A K Peters, Ltd. since 1996...
. He currently sits on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference
Game Developers Conference
The Game Developers Conference is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking...
, 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.
He was recently laid off from Maxis. Hecker is currently working on an "indie" game called SpyParty.
Articles
During his time at Microsoft and Definition Six, Hecker wrote an influential programming column for Game Developer MagazineGame Developer Magazine
Game Developer magazine is the premier publication for working video game creators, and reaches over 35,000 industry professionals monthly. Each month, industry leaders and experts share technical solutions, review new game development tools, and discuss strategies for creating innovative,...
.
Two series of articles from this column still serve today as standard references on their respective subjects. The initial series was the first complete synthesis of perspectively-correct texture mapping, and formed the mathematical basis for many important game rasterizers, including Michael Abrash
Michael Abrash
Michael Abrash is a technical writer specializing in optimization and 80x86 assembly language programming, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge. The original 8086 processor, the focus of the book, was several generations behind the state of the art by...
's seminal rasterizer for the landmark 3D title Quake.
The second was a series on rigid body dynamics simulation for games http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics, complete with an extensive bibliography of rigid body dynamics resources http://chrishecker.com/Physics_References, which has become a standard web reference thereof. The articles were part of a general push by Hecker to incorporate more interactive physics in games, which at the time in 1996 rarely featured any physical simulation.
In the summer of 1997, Hecker stepped down as author of the regular column to focus on game development full-time.
Indie game advocacy
In many interviews and speaking engagements, Hecker has lobbied heavily for the development of an independent games movement.Lamenting the lack of innovation in gameplay, he has pushed for alternative markets and models for small-scale video game production. In 2002, with a few of his friends (largely Looking Glass Studios
Looking Glass Studios
Looking Glass Studios was a computer game development company during the 1990s.The company originally formed as Looking Glass Technologies, when Blue Sky Productions and Lerner Research merged....
veterans), Hecker co-founded the successful Indie Game Jam
Indie Game Jam
The Indie Game Jam is an effort to rapidly prototype video game designs and inject new ideas into the game industry. Started in 2002 by a group of game designer-programmers, the event features a shared game engine technology worked on by other designer-programmers for a single long weekend...
.
In addition to directly leading to the creation of at least one commercial title, the Indie Game Jam inspired others to create their own local game jams worldwide, such as the similarly named Boston Game Jam and Toronto Game Jam
.
Wii comments
At the 2007 Game Developers ConferenceGame Developers Conference
The Game Developers Conference is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking...
, Chris stated that the Wii
Wii
The Wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006. As a seventh-generation console, the Wii primarily competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of the two others...
game console was a "piece of shit" in reference to Wii's low computational power in comparison to competing consoles and that the Wii was hardly better than two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape. He later issued a public apology, saying his earlier comments went too far, and were "no longer thought provoking, just inflammatory" and that "everyone at Nintendo is passionate at making great games." At the 2008 Game Developer Conference, Chris received the first ever Duct Tape Award as a joke from Eric Zimmerman
Eric Zimmerman
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company, which is known for the game Diner Dash. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference...
during the developer's rant session.
Spore: contributions and controversy
Hecker's research and development effort on SporeSpore (2008 video game)
Spore is a multi-genre single-player god game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. The game was released for the Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems in September 2008 as 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, and became a featured presentation at that conference. An interview with Will Wright later claimed that Hecker's work on Spore had advanced the state of the art in procedural animation by several years.
After Spore's release in late 2008, some players considered comments by Hecker made in Seed Magazine to indicate that he had been primarily responsible for the game's lack of hard scientific backing. This interpretation of the interview was discredited by Spore lead designer Will Wright and Spore producer Lucy Bradshaw.