• Home
• People
• Rebecca Heineman

Rebecca Heineman

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, 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 of Olde Skuul in the 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.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 Nintendo 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").In April 2001, she began writing novels based on Sailor Moon, Ranma 1/2, The Terminator, Ace Ventura and Independence Day.In November 2003, she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder and began transitioning to a woman.On March 17, 2008, she launched a webcomic called Sailor Ranko 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 1/2. The art for the webcomic was done by Allison Decker while paneling and lettering was done by Joseph Fanning.On November 30, 2014, she publicly released the source code to the 3DO version of Doom.