Rebecca Heineman
Rebecca Ann Heineman | |
|---|---|
| Born | William Salvador Heineman October 30, 1963 |
| Other names | Burger Becky |
| Occupation(s) | game designer and programmer |
| Known for | Programmer of The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars |
Rebecca Ann Heineman (born William Salvador Heineman) is an American video game programmer. A long-time veteran of the computer game industry (originally credited mostly as Bill Heineman), Heineman was a founding member of Interplay Productions, Logicware, and Contraband Entertainment. She has also been affiliated at various times with Barking Lizards Technologies, Electronic Arts, Bloomberg, Microsoft, MacPlay and Ubisoft, among other game companies. Heineman works as the CEO[1] of Olde Skuul in Seattle, Washington.
She won the National Space Invaders Championship, sponsored by Atari, in November, 1980, making her the first person to ever win a national video game contest.[2][3]
In the mid-1980s, Heineman programmed the cult classic graphic adventure games Tass Times in Tonetown and The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate. Heineman also programmed the Macintosh, Super NES and Apple IIGS ports of Another World, as well as some other lesser-known games, such as Mindshadow, Borrowed Time, Battle Chess, and The Tracer Sanction.
Due to her love of storing hamburgers in her desk drawers, her friends call her "Burger" (and when they would call for her, she would sometimes respond "Burger").[4]
In April 2001, she began writing novels on FanFiction.Net based on Sailor Moon, Ranma ½, The Terminator, Ace Ventura and Independence Day.[5]
In November 2003, she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria[6] and began transitioning to a woman.[7]
On March 17, 2008, she launched a webcomic called Sailor Ranko[8] based on her novels set in the Sailor Ranko universe created by Duncan Zillman and Kevin D. Hammel, based on characters from Sailor Moon and Ranma ½.
On November 30, 2014, she publicly released the source code[9] to the 3DO version of Doom. In July 2015 she released a reverse engineered Apple IIGS version of Space Ace.[10][11]
References
- ^ Rebecca's bio from Olde Skuul's website
- ^ Video Game History November 1980
- ^ Wythe, Anastasia. "Always Been There". Gamemoir. Retrieved April 14, 2015.
- ^ Interview with Michael Cranford an audio recording of Michael speaking about how "Burger" got her nickname
- ^ Rebecca Heineman's Fanfiction.net page copies of Rebecca's novels and short stories
- ^ Becky's coming out letter from Becky's Livejournal
- ^ Interview of Rebecca Heineman that goes into detail of her career and transition
- ^ The Adventures of Sailor Ranko start date of the first page of the comic.
- ^ The complete archive for DOOM for the 3DO on GitHub
- ^ spaceace iigs on GitHub.
- ^ Space-Ace on whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za