SpyParty, which Hecker is self-funding, is a James Bond-esque game set during a cocktail party in which people do normal, party-like things. "It's really hard to fight that kind of hearsay." Then, what do you do? You feel like a dork going in and posting yourself, 'No, I'm not that guy.' "Someone will go, 'Is that that game by that guy who ruined Spore?' Someone hopefully a couple of posts later, will say, 'No, that was debunked.
#Spyparty forums full#
"Even though Will Wright, the creator of the game, took full responsibility for the game we shipped, and I wasn't on the design team at all, to this day people talk about SpyParty in a forum and they're like, isn't that the guy who ruined Spore? Stuff matters. This, according to Hecker, was more damaging than his Wii rant. Hecker then became the "I ruined Spore" developer. After Spore was released and some fans were disappointed with its depth, an interview Hecker gave to a science magazine emerged in which he talked about the cute versus science difference in the game.Īn angry fan blamed all of Spore's problems on Hecker in a post on the game's official forum, which was subsequently picked up by a mainstream news outlet. I apologise for saying it in a way that was too whatever, and making it sound like I was representing the team I didn't, but the articles did." "I actually said it and I have to stand by what I said. The Nintendo fanboys are pretty vehement. "The stars aligned in a completely negative summon a demon kind of way. They were announcing a joint venture for the first time. "In more ways than people even know, that night was the Electronic Arts and Nintendo executive dinner. "But then aiming the article for maximum headline controversy, that's journalism's issue. "I wasn't thinking that because E3 closed down there would be a lot of people sniffing around for news stories in the mainstream press. "The Wii is a piece of sh*t and it's two GameCubes duct taped together are quotable quotes, and I should have chosen my words more carefully with at least some of them. It was obviously my opinion, not the Spore team's opinion. "If I had known it was going to get covered in the mass market press as opposed to just development press, I would have chosen my works more carefully. "So I apologised for saying it that way more for the way it was covered than what I was trying to say. "When I said the Wii stuff it was at the height of Nintendo. Hecker's GDC rant created quite a few problems for the then EA employee. I said it with Public Enemy blaring in the background and some funny slides. "I said it in a very inflammatory way, but the underlying message was a serious point about game design and programming. "They did a lot of interesting stuff with the control system, but unfortunately there's not enough horsepower behind the thing to actually really explore a lot of that stuff. They're just not as interesting, for a lot of reasons. "You can see the ramification of that now with the games. Nintendo made an underpowered platform, relative to what you could have made at the time. "You can do more interesting games with a faster CPU. "Game design and gameplay is not separable from CPU power," he told Eurogamer. But Hecker, who is currently hard at work on indie game SpyParty, stands by his original point. Nintendo needs to be applauded for trying to interface on the controller front, the user." The following day Hecker apologised, saying, "I do not think the Wii is a piece of sh*t. His comments, predictably, hit the headlines.
#Spyparty forums Pc#
In 2007, while at Maxis working on PC game Spore, Hecker took to the stage at the Game Developer Conference and called Nintendo's motion sensing console "a piece of sh*t", labelling it "two GameCubes duct-taped together". Chris Hecker, the developer behind 2007's infamous "the Wii is sh*t" rant, has for the first time revealed the true extent of the impact his comments have had on his career.