Legendary game designer, programmer, Space Invaders champion, and LGBTQ trailblazer Rebecca Heineman has died - OG troon game programmer Burger Bill has died

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PC Gamer (Archive)

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Game developer Rebecca Heineman has died after being diagnosed with cancer last month. The news was shared to Bluesky by Heineman's friend, Heidi McDonald, while the most recent post on Heineman's GoFundMe is a goodbye message stating that her health was rapidly deteriorating, and she was entering palliative care. Heineman was 62, and the GoFundMe will remain live to help her family make final arrangements.

Born in 1963, Heineman initially made a mark on the industry by winning a national Space Invaders tournament in 1980 in New York, becoming the first formally recognized US champion of any videogame. She went on to have a far-reaching career, being credited on 67 games according to MobyGames.

Heineman co-founded Interplay in 1983 alongside Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, and Troy Worrell. The developer and publisher was the source of many foundational PC games, including Wasteland, Fallout, and Baldur's Gate. Heineman designed and programmed a number of games at Interplay, with her most prominent design credit being The Bard's Tale 3: Thief of Fate.

Heineman's friend and colleague from Interplay, Brian Fargo, shared a remembrance of the developer on X. "Rebecca Heineman sadly passed away," Fargo wrote. "Known her since the 80s when I'd drive her to work, one of the most brilliant programmers around. A real gut punch earlier today when she messaged me: 'We have gone on so many adventures together! But, into the great unknown! I go first!!!'"

Later, in the '90s and 2000s, Heineman made a name primarily as a programmer, particularly on ports like the Macintosh versions of Wolfenstein 3D, Baldur's Gate, and Icewind Dale. The saga of Heineman overcoming a deranged businessman to solo program the ill-fated 3DO port of Doom in mere weeks has become a bit of an internet legend: Here's Digital Foundry and Heineman herself recounting the tale.

Heineman publicly came out as transgender in the 2000s, and was married to fellow games industry legend Jennell Jaquays. Heineman was the recipient of Gayming's 2025 Gayming Icon award, with the site writing that "her advocacy for LGBTQ+ inclusion, accessibility, and diversity in tech has inspired countless developers and players."

Jaquays died of complications from Guillain–Barré syndrome in January 2024, and Heineman was blindsided last month by an aggressive cancer diagnosis. She turned to GoFundMe to help with the costs of treatment, where fans, friends, and industry peers showed up to support the developer.

Heineman shared the message last night that her health was rapidly declining.

"It's time. According to my doctors. All further treatments are pointless," Heineman wrote. "So, please donate so my kids can create a funeral worthy of my keyboard, Pixelbreaker! So I can make a worthy entrance for reuniting with my one true love, Jennell Jaquays."

Game developers have begun sharing their own condolences and remembrances in the wake of Heineman's death.
 
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guiltyspark85 said:
I get the pedo that contracted Bill caused all kinds of headaches, but there seems sort of mythology that what Bill achieved with the 3DO port was some sort of miracle. Again, look at the Jaguar port that id did. It was basically a two man team: John Carmack porting over to a console he had no experience with and had less RAM than PCs at the time with Sandy Petersen helping him by optimizing the levels. Once Bill had the Jaguar source code and assets from id, he working on the port in isolation. The work Carmack and Petersen did with the Jaguar port would have helped Bill immensly and saved him a large amount of time.
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At the same time, you *are* talking about John Carmack here. Carmack also worked on the 32X port in a similar time crunch and it didn't turn out as well. I'll agree there's a certain level of mythologizing the development of 3DO Doom, however.
 
So called "Rebecca Heineman" was a man. He was a man. He. Him.

It is not possible for a human being to switch genders.

I know most of us realize this but just in case some normie googles this thread and lands here, I want them to be as demoralized as possible.

So to any wayward redditor reading these words: If you are confused about your own gender, I wholeheartedly recommend that you kill yourself.
 
Yup... There must be a God.

I outlived those two Sons of Bitches that help Destroy the video/entertainment industry with their Ideology.
 
Buzz Killington said:
At the same time, you *are* talking about John Carmack here. Carmack also worked on the 32X port in a similar time crunch and it didn't turn out as well. I'll agree there's a certain level of mythologizing the development of 3DO Doom, however.
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I blame faggots like Derek Alexander for pushing this narrative.

And as you said, everybody talks about the crunch the tranny went with the 3DO port, but no one talks about Carmack's crunch with the 32X port, they even flew him to SEGA of America's offices and had to sleep there to get the port ready for the launch of the console.

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Not Doom related but related to Burger Bill and Jon St John (Duke Nukem's VA), since there hasn't been a new Duke game in forever (pun intended), Jon St John has been shitting out god awful videos with a Duke Nukem puppet called "The Duppet", which brought us such classics as this.



So what does this have to do with Burger Bill, well, Jon St John posted this on his Facebook account.
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Burger Bill wrote lines for these terrible videos.
 
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guiltyspark85 said:
For the era, 2.5 months doesn't seem like a crazy short time for a port. Doom was developed in less than 12 months and the Jaguar port was done in a few weeks by id themselves. The 3DO port was based on the Jaguar port, so there was optimization work done that helped Bill. It amuses me these days that modern remasters of 90s games often have considerably longer development times than the original game.
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Back then you actually used a full workday to work on the project. These days most of your time is consumed in meetings. HR meetings. Company stand-up meetings. Scrum meetings. The average corporate game developer works for maybe 2-3 real hours per day.
 
Mr. Duck said:
Not Doom related but related to Burger Bill and Jon St John (Duke Nukem's VA), since there hasn't been a new Duke game in forever (pun intended), Jon St John has been shitting out god awful videos with a Duke Nukem puppet called "The Duppet", which brought us such classics as this.
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There's also the "Duke says: TRANS RIGHTS!" one, which is more shameful on its own than the whole saga of Duke Nukem Forever.
 
Carmack shipped a Twitter eulogy.

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He was already well into a storied career, but I first knew “Burger” Bill Heineman as a big fish in the small pond of the Apple IIGS community at the start of the 90s, known for doing state of the art low level optimization on a platform with very limited commercial prospects.

In 1992, the programmers in the early Id crew went to Kansas Fest, the grass roots Apple II convention, to show Silas Warner, the author of Castle Wolfenstein for the Apple II, our new take with Wolfenstein 3D.

Someone seeing it for the first time on our laptop made the awed comment “Wow, I thought Bill Heineman was a hot programmer!” and I took that as a very substantial compliment.

We started working with Bill shortly after that, and I really enjoyed talking shop and kicking around ideas with him. We had a lot of overlap in interests and skills, but he had impressive areas outside of my scope – Want to learn the details of Japanese game hardware? Learn to read Japanese technical manuals. Want to develop games for them, but they won’t give you a dev kit? Build your own hardware dev kit.

I was very good at dropping into any system environment and getting shit done fast. He was probably better.

Masters of Doom has the details, which I don’t trust myself to rehash from memory, but our collaboration on the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D completely blew up and left us in a bad position, forcing me to drop what I was doing and do the port myself.

We were mad, but eventually it was water under the bridge, and we wound up working together on additional Id projects afterwards. It was a useful cautionary tale about how brilliant technical people don’t always make wise decisions in other parts of their life.

Bill became Rebecca, and we had email and Twitter contacts (@burgerbecky) over the years. We finally ran into each other again virtually at the covid Kansas Fest (still going after all these years!) and had some fun back and forth on ancient technical topics. They were living in Dallas with Jennell Jaquays, who had been a designer at Id, and I had some intention of getting out for a visit, but it never happened.

I respect how they stayed technical, current, and sharp far longer than most programmers manage, shipping games over 40+ years with many, many generations of hardware. The driving force was always clearly the love of the work. 🫡

L / A
 
It's fucking wild how they get on his ass about "deadnaming" when he's the one who had an actual relationship with the guy in real life and even has nice and respectful things to say about him after the Burgerport Disaster. The entitlement of troons knows no bounds.
 
deleuzeon said:
It's fucking wild how they get on his ass about "deadnaming" when he's the one who had an actual relationship with the guy in real life and even has nice and respectful things to say about him after the Burgerport Disaster. The entitlement of troons knows no bounds.
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If I had to guess, even though they had some correspondence in later years, it didn't sound like it was a lot. He was still just Bill in Carmack's memory. The whining about Deadnaming is ridiculous. The memories are tied to a specific name of when you knew someone and the interactions you had at that time.
 
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