R.I.P. Rebecca Heineman, legendary game designer and trailblazer

By Catherine Masters | November 18, 2025 | 2:08pm

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Games News Rebecca Heineman

R.I.P. Rebecca Heineman, legendary game designer and trailblazer

Rebecca Heineman, the game developer and winner of the first American video game competition, has died. Heineman died after a short battle with lung cancer, her friend Heidi McDonald announced on BlueSky yesterday. She was 62.

Known for co-founding Fallout publisher Interplay, porting Wolfenstein 3D and Doom to the 3DO, and for her penchant for keeping burgers in her desk drawer, Heineman will be remembered for her foundational contributions to the medium. Leveraging her win at Atari’s National Space Invaders Championship in 1980 into writing for Electronic Games Magazine, Heineman took whatever way into games she could. She made her own development kit for the Atari 2600 in order to consult with companies looking to develop for the system. Over the years she would go all over the industry, working as a programmer on the 3DO versions of Doom and Out of this World, designer on The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, and many ports to the Apple Macintosh. She was working on new ports after acquiring the MacPlay branding this past year.

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Coming out as a transgender woman in 2003, Heineman became even more notable as one of the first visibly queer women in the industry, an activist for LGBTQ rights and part of GLAAD’s board of members. Even though she was closeted in her early years, her visibility and use of her platform served and continues to serve as an inspiration for gender marginalized developers.

While at PAX West in September, Heineman noticed she was short of breath from minimal exertion and was soon diagnosed with “aggressive” adenocarcinoma. Although she stayed chipper in her updates throughout the chemotherapy, blood clots and breathing problems persisted. On November 15, her GoFundMe was updated to say that she was being taken by helicopter to St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston; two days later, Heineman posted “It’s time. According to my doctors, all further treatments are pointless.”

She encouraged people to keep donating to help with funeral costs and urged people on social media to look at the career of her wife and “goddess of technology” Jennell Jaquays, who passed away last year. After seeing an outpouring of commemorative messages, she signed off with “Fuck cancer. Fuck it in the ass.”

As said in our initial piece on her diagnosis, the games industry takes people for what they have and churns them out. Many titans like Heineman are forced to rely on people’s kindness in their final days in lieu of equitable wage or public healthcare. It is heartening that she did not pass away in obscurity and got her flowers while she was still here, unlike many of her peers and precursors.

Her final months were painful but bolstered by the support of her friends and the wider games community. Accolades and eulogies have been coming in even before her passing and her GoFundMe campaign set up to shoulder her medical—and, now, funeral—bills is beyond $150,000, tens of thousands past the initial goal. She is survived by her five children, with her daughter Christina arranging the funeral. Our thoughts are with everyone Burger Becky loved and inspired at this time, the industry a poorer place for her passing.