Chris Hecker

Chris Hecker
Chris Hecker at the 2010 Game Developers Conference
Born	Christopher Bryan Hecker 1970 (age 46–47) St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Occupation	Former Technology Fellow at Maxis

Christopher Bryan "Chris" Hecker (born 1970) is an American video game programmer and commentator. He is the founder of the gaming company Definition Six and best known for his engineering work on Will Wright's 2008 game Spore. Hecker is an advocate for the indie game industry and co-founder of the Indie Game Jam. He has written a number of influential articles on programming and has been an editor for Game Developer Magazine and the Journal of Graphics Tools.

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, 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 and lobbied for the OpenGL standard for graphics display. The company never actually shipped a commercial title, but did produce a tech demo. He also spent several years working independently on a game based on rock climbing as a side project, though it was never completed.