Rebecca Ann Heineman, a beloved recreation designer, programmer, software program archivist, and trailblazer has handed away at age 62.
Heineman herself shared the approaching information of her passing in an replace on a GoFundMe web page established to assist her fund her battle in opposition to adenocarcinoma, an aggressive type of most cancers. “Please donate so my youngsters can create a funeral worthy of my keyboard, Pixelbreaker! So I could make a worthy entrance for reuniting with my one real love, Jennell Jaquays,” she wrote. Jaquays, Heineman’s spouse and a fellow trailblazer, handed away in 2024. She is survived by her 5 kids.
Heineman’s accomplishments are so huge you would discover her fingerprints on virtually each a part of American online game historical past.
The multitalented developer led a storied profession founding a number of recreation studios and designing and programming video games all through the Eighties and Nineties. Her most well-known works embrace The Bard’s Story III: Thief of Destiny, Defiance, and Dragon Wars. In 1983 she, Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, and Troy Worrell based Interaction Productions, the studio that might ultimately create Fallout and Wasteland. She labored as a programmer on the latter title.
She later based two extra studios, Logicware and Contraband Leisure, later doing programming work for firms like Digital Arts, Ubisoft, Bloomberg, Amazon, Microsoft, and Sony. Excessive-profile initiatives from this time interval embrace coaching different builders on Xbox 360 improvement and contributing to the kernel code for the PlayStation Moveable and PlayStation 4.
Heineman was additionally a pioneer for transgender recreation builders, transitioning mid-career in 2003 and persevering with to interrupt floor in programming at high-profile firms. She sat on the board of administrators of LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD and was honored this yr with the group’s Gayming Icon Award.
Celebrating “one of the sensible programmers” in online game historical past
Business friends like Brian Fargo, Tim Schaefer, and Jordan Mechner shared tributes to her on social media. Fargo known as her “one of the sensible programmers round,” and shared her closing message to him. “We’ve got gone on so many adventures collectively! However, into the good unknown! I am going first!!!”
Heineman was exceptionally prolific when it got here to discussing her work, leaving a protracted path of tales on her YouTube channel, on panels, and in interviews with retailers like Sport Developer (then Gamasutra). Her relentlessly optimistic perspective was on show in a 2010 interview the place the self-proclaimed “old-timer” described what’s stored her on the earth of recreation improvement.
“What drives me is that I consistently need to be taught, higher myself as an engineer, higher myself as an individual,” she mentioned on the time. “I am consistently on the lookout for the following smartest thing.”
