Rebecca Heineman, a longtime developer who spent decades on the craft of making games, has passed away.
“Rebecca Heineman sadly passed away today,” said Brian Fargo, founder of game companies Interplay and InXile Entertainment, in a Facebook post. “I’ve known her since the 1980s, when I would drive her to work each morning. She was one of the most brilliant programmers I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. It was a real gut punch, especially because we messaged only hours ago and she told me, ‘We have gone on so many adventures together! But, into the great unknown! I go first!'”
Fargo said he was messaging with her maybe an hour before she died. The outpouring of support and love on her GoFundMe showed just how many lives she touched, he said.
Just a week ago, Heineman posted, “F*ck cancer” on her LinkedIn page, which used her nickname Burger Becky. Heineman was most recently the owner of MacPlay, a business she reacquired recently after being one of the original founders of the company that, starting in 1990, made games for the Mac.
Dual identities
Louis Castle, who knew her as both Bill and Becky, said in a message, “B Heineman was a brilliant coder and a genuinely beautiful person. I wish I had more moments to remember. A rebel and a boat rocker who was one of the founders of our industry.”
She was also CEO of her own game company, Olde Sküül, for the past 12 years. Her longtime partner, Jennell Jaquays, passed away before Heineman in 2024. Heineman shared her grief over the loss frequently on social media.
Heineman was also a member of the advisory board of the Video Game History Museum in Frisco, Texas. She spent 14 years as a senior software architect at Contraband Entertainment, and she was a senior software architect at Sony Computer Entertainment for a year in 2011 and 2012.
She was born William Salvador Heineman in October 1963 and grew up in Whittier, California. While young, she couldn’t afford to purchase games for her Atari 2600 game console, so she taught herself how to copy cartridges and built a sizable pirated video collection, according to Wikipedia.
In 1980, she and a friend traveled to Los Angeles to compete in a regional event for a national Space Invaders championship. She won that competition and also won the championship in New York, making her the first national video game tournament champion.
Scott Hawkins said in a message, “The game industry lost one of its pioneers today. From winning the Space Invaders National Championship in 1980 to co-founding Interplay to developing the Atari 2600 emulator that was used in GameTap to inspiring and encouraging countless new developers, Becky’s unending passion and enthusiasm will be missed!!”
After the victory, she took a job at the monthly magazine Electronic Games and wrote a book dubbed How to Master Video Games. At age 16, she took a programming job at game publisher Avalon Hill. She went on to work for Boone Corp. on games like Chuck Norris Superkicks and Robin Hood, and she learned how to program on the Commodore 64, Apple II, VIC-20 and the IBM PC.
The Interplay years
In 1983, she got together with Brian Fargo, Jay Patel and Troy Worrell to start Interplay Productions. She worked on Wasteland, The Bard’s Tale, ports of Out of This World and ports of Wolfenstein 3D.
Fargo said he met Heineman before they started Interplay, hanging out with hackers in Orange County. He recalls parties at his house and Becky looked like a “quintessential computer person with her thick glasses and big” hair.
“By the end of the evening everyone was sitting around her and talking to her,” Fargo said. “She would charm a room with her intellect and personality.”
He said he used to pick her up every single day and drive her to work.
“During the days we were both broke we would eat at Tasty Freeze and get their burgers and that’s where she got the nicknamed burger Bill, which was later burger Becky,” Fargo said.
Alan Pavlish, said in a message, “I’ve worked with Rebecca way back in the early days of Interplay productions. In fact, even before that when we were just kids and didn’t really know what we were doing. Haha. Rebecca was amazingly gifted and was blessed to have been a part of her life. I have nothing but find memories and great stories to tell. She will be dearly missed.”
Heineman also worked on The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, Dragon Wars, Tass Times in Tonetown, Borrowed Time, Mindshadow, The Tracer Sanction, and programmed ports of Battle Chess for Interplay.
Returning to smaller games
As Interplay grew to more than 500 people, Heineman left and, in 1995, started Logicware, working on games that included Defiance. She oversaw ports of Out of This World, Killing Time, Shattered Steel, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and a canceled Mac OS port of Half-Life.
In 1999, she started Contraband Entertainment and worked on ports including Myth III: The Wolf Age, Activision Anthology, and Mac OS ports for Aliens vs. Predator, Baldur’s Gate II and Heroes of Might and Magic IV. She consulted with game companies including Electronic Arts, Barking Lizards Technologies, Gearbox, Amazon, Microsoft and Ubisoft.
During her tenure at Amazon, Heineman was, in addition to her tech role, the “Transgender Chair” of Amazon’s LGBTQ+ group, known as Glamazon. She held a similar role at Microsoft’s GLEAM group. At Sony, she was part of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group the Sony Rainbow Coalition and became a board member at GLAAD. Heineman had come out publicly as transgender in 2003.
After Contraband shut down in 2013, Heineman founded Olde Sküül with Jennell Jaquays, Maurine Starkey, and Susan Manley. She married Jaquays in 2013.
“Burger Becky was an incredible individual who touched so many lives, both in and out of the videogame industry. In the 20+ years I knew her, she never failed to amaze me with the way she was quick to help guide and mentor others looking to get into the industry,” said John Hardie, director of the National Videogame Museum, in a message. “She had her hand in so many projects and was one of the first people to support us and join the advisory board of the National Videogame Museum. Her programming credits were so numerous that it seems like every time we talked, I learned about another game or project that she was involved in. The world and the industry have lost a true treasure.”
In 2018, Heineman spoke on a diversity in games panel at GamesBeat Summit, where she talked about age discrimination in gaming.
Jaquays passed away in 2024. Susan Manley, a game industry friend who also survived cancer, said the treatment was brutal and she knew how hard Heineman fought.
“Becky was a firebrand — a brilliant, mischievous wild mage of engineering. A social butterfly. A chaotic-good spirit. Impossible to schedule, because she followed inspiration wherever it struck. Generous to a fault. Endlessly curious. Endlessly fun,” Manley wrote in a message to me.
She added, “Some of my favorite memories are simple: dinners at home or out with Becky and Jennell, when we’d sit around talking shop, telling stories, laughing about old projects. One little gem — Becky worked on Bard’s Tale III, while Jennell and I worked on the ill-fated Bard’s Tale IV that never shipped. We used to joke that between the three of us, maybe we averaged out to a whole Bard’s Tale.”
And she said, “There are so many projects now that exist only as ideas preserved in archives and bits… but the real legacy is the people she touched, the energy she brought, the worlds she helped build, and the fire she carried. I miss her already.”
Editor’s note: If you’ve got some stories on Rebecca or a quote to offer, please send them my way.