Rebecca Heineman


Rebecca Ann Heineman was an American video game designer and programmer. Heineman was a founder or co-founder of video game companies Interplay Productions, Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül. She was the chief executive officer of Olde Sküül from 2013 until her death in 2025.

Early life

Rebecca Ann Heineman was born William Salvador Heineman on October 30, 1963, 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.
Heineman returned to California to work for another developer, Boone Corporation. For Boone, she programmed the games Chuck Norris Superkicks and Robin Hood, acquiring knowledge of programming for Commodore 64, Apple II, VIC-20, and IBM PC, of video game hardware, as well as video game design. Boone ceased operations in 1983, so Heineman joined Brian Fargo, Jay Patel and Troy Worrell to establish Interplay Productions. Heineman acted as a programmer for the company, working on Wasteland, The Bard's Tale, various ports of Out of This World, and the Mac OS, 3DO and Apple IIGS ports of Wolfenstein 3D.
Heineman went on to design The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate, Dragon Wars, Tass Times in Tonetown, Borrowed Time, Mindshadow, The Tracer Sanction, and programmed various ports of Battle Chess, 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.
In 1999, Heineman founded Contraband Entertainment and served as its chief executive officer. The company developed several original games alongside ports to various platforms for other developers. Projects led by Heineman include Activision Anthology, and Mac OS ports for Aliens vs. Predator, Baldur's Gate II and Heroes of Might and Magic IV. During this time, she also provided consultancy work directly for other companies: she acted as "Senior Engineer III" for Electronic Arts, upgraded engine code for Barking Lizards Technologies and Ubisoft, optimized code for Sensory Sweep Studios, acted as senior software architect for Bloomberg L.P. and Amazon, provided training on Xbox 360 development for Microsoft's development studios, and worked on the kernel code for the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 4 at Sony.
At Microsoft, Heineman also worked on low level code and optimizations for the Kinect. 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. More recently, Heineman worked on self driving cars at Cruise and worked at Roblox
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. Heineman acted as lead programmer for the Battle Chess: Game of Kings.

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. Around 2003, Heineman was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and began to transition to a woman. She formally changed her given name to Rebecca Ann. Following the transition, Heineman lived as a lesbian. As of 2020, Heineman resided in Heath, Texas.
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. Heineman won the Gayming Icon Award at the 2025 Gayming Awards.

Games

  • Robin Hood
  • Chuck Norris Superkicks
  • Mindshadow
  • The Tracer Sanction
  • The Bard's Tale
  • Borrowed Time
  • Racing Destruction Set
  • Tass Times in Tonetown
  • Wasteland
  • The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate
  • Neuromancer
  • Battle Chess
  • Crystal Quest
  • Dragon Wars
  • Track Meet
  • RPM Racing
  • Out of This World
  • Rescue Rover
  • Interplay's 10 Year Anthology: Classic Collection
  • Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
  • Wolfenstein 3D
  • Descent
  • Kingdom: The Far Reaches
  • Doom
  • Killing Time
  • Defiance
  • Shattered Steel
  • Tempest 2000
  • Remington Top Shot: Interactive Target Shooting
  • Redneck Rampage
  • Jazz Jackrabbit 2
  • Bugdom
  • Myth III: The Wolf Age
  • Aliens Versus Predator
  • Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
  • Nanosaur Extreme
  • Icewind Dale
  • Heretic II
  • Heroes of Might and Magic IV
  • Hexen II
  • Activision Anthology
  • Medal of Honor: Rising Sun
  • Pitfall: The Lost Expedition
  • Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault
  • GoldenEye: Rogue Agent
  • Medal of Honor: European Assault
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II
  • Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
  • Alvin and the Chipmunks
  • Chip's Challenge
  • ''Battle Chess: Game of Kings''