Rebecca Heineman aka Burger Bill
In 1992, I first met Rebecca Heineman, an actual computer game programmer with whom I was slated to work. She was the first of many self-taught individuals I would get to know at the new dawn of the computer video game era. Those memories, from my three short years at Interplay Productions, have lasted a lifetime. Among my responsibilities (which included producing and directing SimCity Enhanced CD-ROM), I also fulfilled the daily lunch order of keeping Rebecca well supplied with burgers.
In 2019, I had the pleasure of meeting her again, along with her spouse, Jennell Jaquays. I was there to gift Rebecca a rare matte painting used in Éric Chahi’s amazing game Out Of This World as part of its release on the new 3DO platform. I had commissioned matte paintings from a Hollywood storyboard artist, who recreated new background paintings to enhance the visual quality of those scenes for playback on the 3DO player. Those scenes were originally rendered in lower resolution graphics, often using 256 colors (8-bit) in that early era, while the 3DO supported 16-bit palettized color or true 24-bit color.
Her passing in late 2025 is deeply felt across a larger community.
Ms. Heineman, who taught herself to program at the dawn of the home video game era, in the 1970s, made her name as a founder of a number of game studios, including Interplay Productions (now Interplay Entertainment), Logicware and Contraband Entertainment. She was known as well for her innovative work on the development of the popular game Doom for 3DO, a type of console introduced in the 1990s. In 1983, while still working under her birth name, she joined the noted game developer Brian Fargo, along with Jay Patel and Troy Worrell, to start Interplay.
Rebecca Heineman, Transgender Video Game Pioneer, Dies at 62, New York Times ~ Dec. 4, 2025
Among the projects she developed or helped develop were the popular fantasy role-playing games Dragon Wars, released in 1989 for computers like the Commodore 64 and Apple II, and The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, a title that was released a year earlier. It was included in the exhibition “The Art of Video Games” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington in 2012.
