Chris Hecker has announced that he’s been laid off from Maxis, where he was a major contributor to Spore. In the announcement Chris reveals that he’ll be working on Spy Party, a game which he demoed at this year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. In the game you play a sniper watching a cocktail party from another building, trying to figure out which of the partygoers is the spy by looking for various tells. I saw it at EGW and it’s a cool take on the spy genre.
Chris isn’t new to indie games by any means, having helped organize the Indie Game Jam and The Experimental Gameplay Workshop for several years. He also infamously ranted about the Nintendo Wii at GDC 2007, which – even though he was speaking for himself – ended up becoming the rather lurid headline “Spore Developer Calls Wii a Piece of Shit.” Good times!
It’ll be exciting to see what Chris comes up with now that he’s gone ronin! Good luck, man!