Rebecca Heineman, co-founder of video game company Interplay Entertainment, has died at 62. As Rock Paper Shotgun has reported, her friends and colleagues from the industry broke the news on their social media accounts. According to Heineman’s GoFundMe campaign, she was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma a few months ago. In her last update, she revealed that “all further treatments [were] pointless” and that all donations will go towards her funeral being arranged by her children. Heineman’s last post on Instagram was a tribute to her wife Jennell Jaquays who died in 2024 due complications brought by Guillain–Barré syndrome.
Heineman won the Atari 2600 Space Invaders championship in 1980 before she was offered a job as a programmer at 16 years old by Avalon Hill Games. She then co-founded Interplay as Interplay Productions back in 1983 with Brian Fargo, Jay Patel and Troy Worrell. Under Interplay, she designed The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate among other games. In 1999, she founded Contraband Entertainment, which worked on the Mac OS ports for Aliens vs. Predator and Baldur’s Gate II. Heineman also worked as a senior software engineer at Electronic Arts, senior engine programmer at Ubisoft Toronto and senior software architect at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
