On Monday, veteran game developer Rebecca Ann Heineman died in Rockwall, Texas, at age 62 after a battle with adenocarcinoma. Apogee founder Scott Miller first shared the news publicly on social media, and her son William confirmed her death with Ars Technica. Heineman’s GoFundMe page, which displayed a final message she had posted about entering palliative care, will now help her family with funeral costs.
Rebecca “Burger Becky” Heineman was born in October 1963 and grew up in Whittier, California. She first gained national recognition in 1980 when she won the national Atari 2600 Space Invaders championship in New York at age 16, becoming the first formally recognized US video game champion. That victory launched a career spanning more than four decades and 67 credited games, according to MobyGames.
Among many achievements in her life, Heineman was perhaps best known for co-founding Interplay Productions with Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, and Troy Worrell in 1983. The company created franchises like Wasteland, Fallout, and Baldur’s Gate. At Interplay, Heineman designed The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars while also programming ports of classics like Wolfenstein 3D and Battle Chess.
Credit: MobyGames A screenshot of the MS-DOS version of “The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate.”
After leaving Interplay in 1995, Heineman founded Logicware and later Contraband Entertainment in 1999. At Contraband, she led development on Myth III: The Wolf Age and oversaw ports for major titles including Baldur’s Gate II and Heroes of Might and Magic IV.
During the 1990s, her work on the 3DO port of Doom became infamous in gaming history. Heineman programmed the port in a matter of weeks under extreme circumstances, a story she later detailed on GitHub and in interviews.
In 2013, she founded Olde Sküül with her wife Jennell Jaquays and other industry veterans, serving as CEO until her death. Ars Technica previously spoke with Heineman in 2022 about her studio’s work on a Stadia port of Luxor Evolved that was canceled when Google shut down the streaming service.