Chris Hecker
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christopher Bryan Hecker is a programmer and commentator associated with independent video games.
[edit] Biography
Hecker was a student at Parsons 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 lead the development of WinG for the Windows operating system and wrote the rendering engine for the real-time globe display in Encarta World Atlas. He left the company in the 1990s to start Definition 6, an Oakland, California based games and computer graphics consulting company that pushed the OpenGL standard for graphics display.
Hecker sits on the advisory board for the Game Developers Conference. For many years he was Editor-At-Large of Game Developer Magazine. He uses both of these platforms to lobby for the development of an independent games movement. Lamenting the lack of innovation in gameplay, Hecker 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 veterans), Hecker co-founded the successful Indie Game Jam.
Hecker spent many years working independently on a game based on the sport of rock climbing. In 2004, he took a job with Maxis, working with Will Wright on Spore.
In 2006, Hecker was awarded the Community Contribution award at the Game Developers Choice Awards at the 2006 Game Developer Conference.
At the 2007 Game Developers Conference, Chris delivered a controversial anti-Nintendo rant, referring to their Wii game console as a "piece of shit" in reference to Wii's low computational power in comparison to competing consoles.[1] Widely reported was his comment that the Wii was merely "two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape". He later issued a public apology, saying his earlier speech was "[not] thought provoking, just inflammatory" and that "it's obvious that everybody at Nintendo is passionate at making games."[2]. At the 2008 Game Developer Conference, Chris received the first ever "Duct tape" award as a joke from Eric Zimmerman during the developer's rant session.
