Rebecca Heineman

Rebecca Ann Heineman (October 30, 1963 – November 17, 2025) 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 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. 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. 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.

Ludography + Game Credits Year Game Note(s) Ref(s) 1983 Robin Hood VIC-20 port 1984 Chuck Norris Superkicks C64/VIC-20 ports 1986 Tass Times in Tonetown 1989 Battle Chess Ports 1989 Dragon Wars 1992 Out of This World SNES port 1994 Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness Apple IIGS port 1999 Redneck Rampage Mac port 1999 Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Mac port 2001 Myth III: The Wolf Age 2002 Activision Anthology 2004 Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault 2015 Battle Chess: Game of Kings