'I had permission, but that was the year that everyone quit and made iPhone games. 'When I was going to show it at GDC at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop one year, everything was fine,' Hecker recalls. Developers toiling away at huge publishers like EA started flocking to independent and mobile development. The iPhone and the iTunes App Store happened. With some help from game designer Will Wright, he got clearance from EA to use character models from The Sims in his game, which he planned to show at an indie game jam. He had permission from EA to develop personal game projects in his downtime, a stipulation of his employment agreement.

Hecker began developing SpyParty in his free time, while he was working - and getting 'kind of creatively frustrated' - on Spore at Electronic Arts. SpyParty originally borrowed its visual assets from The Sims, Maxis and Electronic Arts' life simulation game. Say goodbye to SpyParty's out-of-fashion, ad hoc visual style and welcome its dashing new successor. With hundreds of players currently beta testing SpyParty and thousands in a queue waiting to play, the game's creator turns his attention to what his game is currently lacking: beauty, fashion, and a sense of style. His laser focus has been on crafting the multiplayer espionage game's tuning and balance. Hecker has been working on SpyParty for more than three years. It's a game of quiet perception and study, with just one chance - one bullet - to either take out a target or murder an innocent civilian. The sniper must watch carefully for player tells: a tap on a shoulder, the movement of an object, a murmured audio cue. Watching the spy from a distance is the other player, a sniper who attempts to identify human behavior amongst artificial intelligently-controlled behavior. The critically-praised, asymmetric multiplayer espionage game plays like a reverse Turing test, with one player - the spy - doing his or her best to believably mingle with a crowd of computer-controlled partygoers, all while stealthily, subtly performing a series of tasks. Chris Hecker's SpyParty is currently a game not lacking in substance, but style.

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