Rebecca Heineman

Rebecca Ann Heineman was born William Salvador Heineman and raised in Whittier, California. When she was young, she could not afford to purchase games for her Atari 2600, so she taught herself how to copy cartridges and built herself a sizable pirated video game collection. Eventually, she moved from copying games to reverse engineering the console's code to understand how the games were made. In 1980, Heineman and a friend traveled to Los Angeles to compete in a regional qualifying round of a national Atari 2600 Space Invaders championship. Although she did not expect to place among the top 100 contestants, she won the competition. Later that year, she also won the championship in New York. Heineman is hence the first champion of a national U.S. video game tournament. == Career ==

After she won the tournament, Heineman was offered a writing job for monthly magazine Electronic Games and a consultancy job for a book called How to Master Video Games. During this time, she mentioned to one magazine publisher that she had reverse-engineered Atari 2600 code, and the publisher arranged a meeting between Heineman and the owners of game publisher Avalon Hill. As she met with them, she was hired as a programmer instantaneously. Heineman, aged 16 at the time, moved across the U.S. for her new job, canceling her plans to acquire a high school diploma. At Avalon Hill, Heineman created a manual for the company's programming team, the studio's game engine, and the base code for several software projects, including her own first game, London Blitz, before leaving the company. and the Mac OS, 3DO and Apple IIGS ports of Wolfenstein 3D. among others, for Interplay. As the company grew to more than 500 employees, Heineman, wishing to return to her small-team roots, left the company in 1995 and co-founded Logicware, where she acted as chief technology officer and lead programmer. Aside from original games such as Defiance, Heineman oversaw the company's porting activities, which included Out of This World, Killing Time, Shattered Steel, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and a canceled Mac OS port of Half-Life. During her tenure at Amazon, Heineman was, in addition to her technological role, also the "Transgender Chair" of Amazon's LGBTQ+ group, known as Glamazon. Contraband was wound down in 2013, and Heineman founded a new company, Olde Sküül, together with Jennell Jaquays, Maurine Starkey, and Susan Manley. At Olde Sküül, Heineman acted as CEO. == Personal life and death ==

In a segment in the documentary series High Score, Heineman said she was drawn to video games at a young age, as they "allowed me to be myself" and "allowed me to play as female". As early as at the founding of Interplay, Heineman had a concern with her birthname; at that time, Interplay's founders were not taking a salary, and so to sustain herself, she bought a large number of cheap hamburgers from a nearby hamburger stand and kept them in her desk, which led to the nickname "Burger", a name she preferred to be called by over the next twenty years rather than her birth name. She formally changed her given name to Rebecca Ann. Following the transition, Heineman lived as a lesbian. Heineman was married to Jennell Jaquays, a fellow transgender woman. Jaquays died in 2024. Heineman had three children from an earlier marriage that ended in divorce. In October 2025, Heineman revealed she had been diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer, and had begun treatment the preceding month. She had started a GoFundMe to raise funds for her medical treatments, but by November 16, told her followers that she had been told her condition was terminal, and requested the funds be used towards her funeral. She died in Rockwall, Texas, on November 17, 2025, at the age of 62. Tributes were given by industry figures who had worked with her, including Interplay co-founder Brian Fargo and game designers Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone. == Board service ==

Heineman was part of the advisory board of the Videogame History Museum from 2011, and was part of the board of directors of LGBTQ+ organization GLAAD. == Accolades ==

Sailor Ranko, a Sailor Moon and Ranma ½–based fanfiction comic by Heineman based on an earlier work written by Duncan Zillman, has won multiple awards. In 2017, she was inducted into the International Video Game Hall of Fame. In 2026, she was posthumously awarded the Game Developers Conference Ambassador Award. == Games ==

• Robin Hood (1983, VIC-20 port) • Chuck Norris Superkicks (1984, C64/VIC-20 ports) • Tass Times in Tonetown (1986) • Battle Chess (1989, ports) • Dragon Wars (1989) • Out of This World (1992, SNES port) • Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (1994, Apple IIgs port) • Remington Top Shot: Interactive Target Shooting (1998) • Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (1999, Mac port) • Myth III: The Wolf Age (2001) • Activision Anthology (2002) • Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault (2004) • Battle Chess: Game of Kings (2015) == See also ==