In 2004, Hecker took a job with Maxis where he worked with Will Wright on what became the 2008 game "Spore". He led the development of many of the key technologies on "Spore", including the core creature tessellation, painting, skinning, and animation technologies. Hecker's research and development effort on "Spore" is widely regarded as a major step forward in procedural character animation and rendering. Part of the technology he developed while working on the project was later selected for publication in the SIGGRAPH 2008 Transactions on Graphics conference proceedings, and became a featured presentation at that conference. Wright later claimed in an interview that Hecker's work on "Spore" had advanced the state of the art in procedural animation by several years. Following "Spore'"s release in late 2008, some players believed that comments Hecker had made in Seed Magazine indicated that he had been primarily responsible for the game's lack of hard scientific backing. This interpretation of the interview was discredited by Wright. and Spore producer Lucy Bradshaw. Hecker was laid off from Maxis in late 2009, and is currently working on the "indie" game "SpyParty". On December 4, 2013, Microsoft announced that Hecker's studio, Definition Six, was one of many indie game developers to join the ID@Xbox program.