Let’s give thanks for the life and work of Rebecca “Burger Becky” Heineman

it’s extremely weird that Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Kirby and Smash Bros., would suddenly announce that we shouldn’t think about the people who make the games we play, just as I was trying to get this tribute to Rebecca Heineman in a state worthy of being posted on this first class world wide website. Sakurai is a sweetheart, and he’ll always have my respect, but he couldn’t be more wrong on this one. Games are reflections of the people who made them, and are relatively meaningless outside of that fact. Rebecca’s life is a shining example of that fact. 

Without Rebecca “Burger Becky” Heineman, Fallout or Baldur’s Gate probably wouldn’t exist. The Kinect or PS4 wouldn’t either, at least not in the way that we know them now. And the whole RPG genre wouldn’t be the same without her. She was there when they all started, having co-founded Interplay, the company that created the former titles, and then later working on the latter two pieces of hardware, all the while working as a sustained voice in the ongoing evolution of Role-playing Games – games where you decide what role you want to play. Empowering people to find themselves and tell their own stories through video games. That was her life work.

She died in November in 2025, and the response to the loss among people who truly love the medium has been huge. So many people saw themselves in her, and had for decades. She was one of the first people to love games so intensely and so publicly, with her unexpected passion forming a path under her feet that she would walk down for the rest of her life. Video games were not just a toy or a time waster for her. They were her everything, and they grew into something that provided her with a career, and more importantly to herself, the opportunity to meet the love of her life.

VIDEO GAME MASTER

Rebecca first made headlines when she became the first Space Invaders National Champion in 1980. She was just 17. It was well before her gender transition. But already, video games had given her the opportunity to define herself by her own terms, taking on the title of video game master before most people imagined such an achievement even existed. It seemed that she was always happiest when she was pushing the envelope of what was possible, unveiling truths about what people and games were capable of in the process. 

She wanted to help others uncover those truths too, leading her to work at the publication Electronic Games in the early ’80s, and also work as a consultant on the guidebooks How To Master The Video Games and How To Master Home Video Games. Many of the strategies outlined there are still used by players today. 

This was all before Heineman turned 21. 

As an adult, after learning to code by reverse engineering games from the Atari 2600 so she could pirate them, Heineman started working as a professional game designer and programmer. Game development as a profession was still in its infancy, and the rules of who got to do what in the industry were far from established. Only people who could stomach uncertainty could handle it, and it was common for developers to solve problems in ways that no one ever had before. Every day was a roll of the dice.

PROGRAMMING MIRACLES

Not only did Rebecca roll, but she also created new dice all on her own. She co-founded Interplay in the 1980s. There, she worked on many games, and handled the design of The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate. While it was after she left the company in 1995, Interplay later produced Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and many other franchises. She’d go on to found at least two other companies, while continuing to work as a consultant, programmer, and contractor for the big names like Sony, Activision, and Microsoft. It didn’t seem to matter to Rebecca if she was at the top or the bottom of the hierarchy of whatever company she was in. All that mattered was the work – the art of creation. Making things made her happy, and she never stopped, even when the odds were against her. And no matter how cursed the job, she never shied away from sharing her experiences. The rushed job of coding the 3DO port of Doom, which launched on Panasonic’s ironically doomed software, was one of the stories she loved telling the most. 

But the topic that Rebecca was most jubilant and passionate about was talking about Jannell Jaquays, the love of her life. Jannell was an adored developer and illustrator, having worked on both video games and traditional dice-based RPGs for decades. When she and Rebecca first got together, they were both in a new phase of life – industry veterans who had experienced prior relationships and had built separate families of their own. In theory, neither should have wanted to take a chance on starting a romantic relationship that late in the game. Being middle-aged, much of their lives was already in the rearview mirror. But their intense love for each other couldn’t be contained by conventional ideas about who you should be with and what order the events of your life should take. They were head over heels for each other, with a passion and excitement that’s usually reserved for teens and 20-somethings that don’t know better. But they did know better. And that knowledge only served to strengthen their bond. 

The two worked on many projects together, including an unreleased HD remaster of Dragon Wars, before Jannell died of Guillain–Barré syndrome in 2024. Rebecca was heartbroken, and struggled to go on. Still, her passion for life couldn’t be completely drowned by grief for long. She openly chronicled her intense sadness and longing for her wife online, slowly crawling out the deepest parts of her sorrow and returning to live events, engaging in mentoring, and conducting interviews in 2025. She had become something of a minor celebrity in the industry, for at least the second or third time, after appearing in the Netflix documentary High Score in 2020. This led her to continue to go to conventions, appear on panels, and sign autographs, right up until she noticed a severe cough at PAX West 2025. It was cancer.  6 months later, she is gone.

PIXELBREAKER

In her final post for her GoFundMe campaign for her cancer treatment, and now, funeral arrangements, she said “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.”

In passing, her relationship with the industry at large was as strong as ever, her strength in the face of the unknown inspiring underdogs everywhere to keep moving forward. But the path she helped pave for us won’t stay clean and clear without some effort. We have to keep talking about her and other artists like her, sharing their stories, and keep their work alive. Too often, the people with the biggest megaphones and largest bank accounts are the ones to write the history books that define our industry. But Rebecca Heineman did just as much, if not more, for video games than any cartoon mascot or tech CEO. She led by example, always putting games and the people who played them first. Her unselfish love for the medium outshining any profit motive. 

On Facebook, her son William Heineman has announced that “Funeral service [for Rebecca Heineman] will be held at McAulay and Wallace Mortuary in Fullerton CA from 4pm-8pm on December 5th. Service will be live streamed on the mortuary site. Burial will be the following morning at Rose Hills Cemetery in Whittier on December 6^th”