He knows that most indie developers don't have swollen coffers from a senior position at a legacy company like Microsoft, nor do they have family members willing to throw money down the rabbit hole. Hecker has absolutely no delusions about his privilege. "I spent my daughter's college fund and all my life's savings, the last couple years was kinda like 'Woah, what am I doing here,' like, 'All right I guess I'm burning all of this down,' there was a lot of anxiety which is distracting from actual development," he says. Once he left the company, Hecker tells me he had a couple hundred thousand dollars in his savings account, as well as a low-mortgage house in the Bay Area that he describes as the "perfect indie situation." It was more than enough to subsist on through SpyParty's development, though Hecker tells me at the tail end, he did borrow some money from his mother to push through the final thresholds. His career at Microsoft started in the '90s, and ended after 2008 when Will Wright's ultra-hyped, ultimately flawed universe simulator hit store shelves.
The last project he worked on before SpyParty was Spore. So how did Hecker manage to stay afloat for the past decade? How could he afford to take a Duke Nukem Forever amount of time to create his cloak-and-dagger masterpiece? Simple. Like, 'Oh, I have to suffer and go make hundreds of thousands of dollars at Facebook.' Chris Hecker I can program a computer in the Bay Area, I'm not gonna starve to death. No major publisher would rip him off they simply wouldn't want to take the risk. However, Hecker was always secure in the knowledge that SpyParty was a difficult game to make-a delicately poached egg of an idea that takes a little bit of madness to get right. There was also The Ship, originally a Half-Life 2 mod, and Murderous Pursuits (opens in new tab) by the same team. Sure, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood took a crack at the concept with its tacked-on but surprisingly fun multiplayer mode (in which assassins attempt to stab each other on cobblestone Italian streets full of innocent bystanders dressed just like them). Over the course of those nine years, Hecker has never been afraid of people beating him to the punch.
First as a closed-beta shipped out to hungry email accounts, then as a for-profit open-beta available from the website (opens in new tab). To be clear, SpyParty has been available in some form over the course of its protracted development.
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