Rebecca Heineman (1963)
Co-Founder of Interplay, Programmer of The Bard's Tale, and First Esports Champion
Rebecca 'Burger Becky' Heineman is an American video game programmer, co-founder of Interplay Productions, and the victor of history's first national esports championship. Winning Atari's 10,000-participant National Space Invaders Championship in 1980, she became gaming's first documented tournament champion. At Interplay, Heineman coded foundational titles including The Bard's Tale III and Wasteland, legendary for reverse-engineering platforms under extreme hardware constraints.
The 1980 Space Invaders Championship
At age 17, Heineman triumphed over 10,000 contestants across regional qualifiers to capture the 1980 National Space Invaders Championship in New York City. Widely recognized as the inception of competitive video gaming (esports), the victory catapulted her into assembly programming for Avalon Hill and Boone Corporation.
Interplay Engineering Feats
Co-founding Interplay in 1983 with Brian Fargo, Heineman architected graphic adventure engines across Apple II, Commodore 64, and DOS. Her virtuoso ports—such as re-engineering Éric Chahi's Another World to run vector polygon animations fluidly on the Super Nintendo's slow Ricoh CPU—stand as masterclasses in low-level systems engineering.