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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Drunken Fox said:
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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A lot of those comments are saying it would have been better for Carmack to say nothing at all, which is insanely disrespectful, but also then you know they'd just bitch about that too if he had. You can't win with these people unless you pretty much become one of them. Psychos.
 
The main thing I remember about this person is they worked on the PC version of the FPS Killing Time. Which they got hired on because they worked on Wolfenstein 3D/Doom's 32x port and had the code for Doom's Jaguar port already. It is amusing to me that Carmack mentions the Wolfenstein 3D incident in his eulogy. Romero never identified the programmer after he trooned out but Carmack full on did it. This is Carmack trying to be nice about the death of some guy who fucked up and forced him to do more work 30 years ago. He just doesn't care about tranny bullshit aside from just mentioning it in passing.
 
Drunken Fox said:
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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Every one of their attempts to belittle Carmack come across as delusional seethe. The guy is still an industry innovator and no less sharp than he was back in the day, they just can't stand that he won't pay lip service to their fetishistic dress up. Meanwhile they bow at Romero's feet despite him doing basically nothing the last two decades beyond upcharging for an extra classic DOOM episode because he sucks off troons.
 
Halbschwanz said:
Every one of their attempts to belittle Carmack come across as delusional seethe. The guy is still an industry innovator and no less sharp than he was back in the day, they just can't stand that he won't pay lip service to their fetishistic dress up. Meanwhile they bow at Romero's feet despite him doing basically nothing the last two decades beyond upcharging for an extra classic DOOM episode because he sucks off troons.
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The Romero worship makes me laugh considering the most he's done since Quake is the infamously shit Daikatana and a few map packs for Doom.
 
deleuzeon said:
A lot of those comments are saying it would have been better for Carmack to say nothing at all, which is insanely disrespectful, but also then you know they'd just bitch about that too if he had. You can't win with these people unless you pretty much become one of them. Psychos.
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They'd rather everyone was an anxiety ridden agoraphobic recluse with no strong ties to anyone. Basically they want everyone to be as miserable as them. That's my guess, anyway.
 
ZipDisk said:
It isn't leave out, it's flat out being scrubbed right now. Like when I heard people saying the SNES port of doom was good I was like "No it fucking wasn't, what is this shit?"
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The PORT itself was a masterclass in shoving 10 lbs of shit into a 5 lb bag. The game itself doesn't hold up to any of the other ports.
Chapalapachapa said:
Romero gets a bad rep with the daikana trainwreck and now being an old fag but this is badass lmao
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Romero is the epitome of getting rich making doom and quake and not really caring about working after that.
 
Maybe it's not the place for discussing it but honestly "can it run DOOM" (I mean, back in the 1990s) was so stupid. Yeah, I understood, they wanted to get it as many places as possible but every port of it not on a 486/66 or better, was shit. "But muh nintendo muh 3do muh jaguar muh playstation" ... they were all either hacked up messes or 4-10fps slideshows forced to run on hardware they were never meant to.

"Oh but what an achievement!" is the same thing you say about people who get quake running on a Nest thermostat. I get it that iD was slurping up as much cash as possible but that doesn't make it good.

I have a little tiny bit of respect for Randy Linden's port of DOOM to the SNES because he said "Fuck it, I'll just write a DOOM engine and make it run, then hand it to iD, then DOOM will be on SNES." and he did it essentially alone.
 
thx1138 said:
Maybe it's not the place for discussing it but honestly "can it run DOOM" (I mean, back in the 1990s) was so stupid. Yeah, I understood, they wanted to get it as many places as possible but every port of it not on a 486/66 or better, was shit.
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You must not be old enough to be there but computers used to cost the equivalent of 10k, nothing worked right out of the box, PC gaming was an ordeal. It was like having an arcade cabinet in your house. Of course nothing directly compared. Most computers were outdated and could barely keep up with software 6 months later.

Doom was the first huge release that went open source, so it went from being a miracle of being able to play cut down ports on consoles, to a joke of what is the worst device you can shove the code into.

Remember we didn't get arcade accurate ports of games till the PS2/Dreamcast.
 
Bonesjones said:
You must not be old enough to be there but computers used to cost the equivalent of 10k, nothing worked right out of the box, PC gaming was an ordeal. It was like having an arcade cabinet in your house. Of course nothing directly compared. Most computers were outdated and could barely keep up with software 6 months later.

Doom was the first huge release that went open source, so it went from being a miracle of being able to play cut down ports on consoles, to a joke of what is the worst device you can shove the code into.

Remember we didn't get arcade accurate ports of games till the PS2/Dreamcast.
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I know full well what PCs used to cost. A pc that could run rings around the cripplingly low framerate on the Jag (or any other) version of DOOM wasn't the equivalent of $10k.
 
thx1138 said:
I know full well what PCs used to cost. A pc that could run rings around the cripplingly low framerate on the Jag (or any other) version of DOOM wasn't the equivalent of $10k.
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The average pc in 1993 was a 486 25/33sx not whatever 486/66 you are thinking of, and they couldnt run Doom full speed.
 
Is it still deadnaming when they're focking dead?
Deadnaming is such a stupid made up internet thing, and I especially hate how conventional search engines "respect" it by scrubbing the actual results.

Like if you change your name, sure, you're "burger becky" now, but burger bill's fuckups belong to burger bill.

I won't call them by their made-up gender though, the tolerance in the US for that shit is ended.

Carmack is following conventional gender policy instead of Tumblr Speshul.

One nice thing about all these worthless freaks screeching is it will help John curate a robust blocklist.
 
reptile baht spaniard rid said:
If my daughter married, had five kids, and then told me she was a programmer, I'd assume she was a tranny. That's how often you'll be right, 99% of "women programmers" are men.

Porting DooM is insanely easy - if you know programming, and know how it's modularized, you can do ports relatively quickly.

Reading https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/ gives you a pretty good understanding of the engine and how it ports; you'll notice the 3DO port is the shittiest, whereas others even added features and improved performance (the book notes a few places where even Carmack admits "we fucked the pooch").
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The only thing that comes to mind of the 3DO port was it's soundtrack and it's turn boosting where the camera picks up speed the longer you hold the directional button.
The Saturn port was considerably bad also, since Carmack insisted on using the CPU to render everything instead of offloading it to the Saturn's VDP processors. Originally the accelerated version would have suffered from slight texture warping due to the way the Saturn handled 3D graphics.
Mr. Duck said:
It's also worth noting that Burger Bill's boss in that project ended up arrested for being a pedo years later, so his "biggest contribution to gaming" is working with a pedophile on the worst official port of Doom.

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WTF even the boss looks like a troon
 
Man, so many geek OGs trooned out. . .
Since Romero was brought up, I will give him props for wearing long hair, flashy clothes, and the occasional full set of acrylic nails and not saying it transforms him into something other than a man. He also has humbled a bit now that he's older, and works with game archivers.
 
I've always had the feeling that the story about the 3DO port was not completely honest. We only ever heard the story coming from Bill. From what I'm gathering on this thread, the dude never actually worked on much and was a bit of a incompetent narcissist. Shocker, the troon is a narcissist. I wouldn't be surprised if Art Data actually lied about how much work was done and did fuck Bill over. However, it's a bit odd that Bill was being told a bunch of work was already done yet for some reason he is being hired on as the sole developer. Why would they lose a team of devs just to hire on one guy? That logic makes no sense and should have set off alarms bells unless Bill was that inexperienced he had no idea himself how much work goes into creating a port. So, I also wouldn't be surprised that Bill knew this but overestimated his own skills because he worked adjacent to bigger names and totally thought he could develop a port in 10 weeks. Then he projected his failings onto the CEO.
 
Kola said:
Looks like he was grooming minors, as is customary for male transvestites. Some legacy.
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With fags, it being a bad brain wiring issue I can buy. Transgenders cannot reproduce; they are like a virus. They have to infect the minds of teenagers to reproduce, when they're in their 50's and balding.
 
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