REBECCA HEINEMAN
Her four decades in the games business have seen Rebecca Heineman go through big changes both on and off-screen. She tells Retro Gamer about bards, burgers and becoming Becky
If we challenged you to a game of Space Invaders on the Atari 2600, who would win?
[Laughs]. I would destroy you. I won the national Space Invaders championship in 1980 when I had just turned 17. If it wasn’t for that contest, my life would be vastly different. I would probably have gone into retail or gotten a factory job.
Videogame designer was not on your radar then?
I really wanted to be a train driver! I did have a part-time job before that tournament repairing videogames at the Electric Planet Arcade in Montebello, California. I was opening up cabinets, replacing chips, diagnosing problems, moving machines… those things were heavy!
Didn’t you win a Missile Command cabinet as your prize?
Yes, but I actually wanted to win the second prize, an Atari 800, which came with a printer, disk drive and a bunch of games. If I’d come second, I’m pretty sure I would have developed games for that computer, not the Apple II, which I already had at home.
After that victory, you ended up writing tips for Electronic Games magazine, the first US publication of its kind.
When I won the tournament, I was immediately swamped by journalists from Time magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times and lots of others… I had interviews with national TV networks. I had my 15 minutes of fame! In the crowd was Arnie Katz, Bill Kunkel and Joyce Whorley and they’d just created this new magazine. They thought it would be cool to get me, a ‘champion’, to write articles about how to beat videogames. I said yes because I didn’t know any better. We note you were never asked to write tips about food storage.
You mean keeping burgers in my desk drawer? [Giggles] I still do that. It’s the only way to get them just right… it started off as a necessity and I turned it into an art form.
It also led to your nickname, ‘Burger’, which started out as an insult, but you seem to have embraced it.
I had a personal reason for that. I’m transgender, so I had a different name back then and I hated it. I knew it was only a pen name and I’d drop it one day. I always knew my real name was Rebecca but I couldn’t tell anybody. Back in the Eighties, coming out as transgender was an automatic firing offence
If it wasn’t for that contest, my life would be different. I would probably have gone into retail or a factory job Rebecca Heineman
and I couldn’t afford to destroy my livelihood. So when people started giving me this nickname of ‘Burger’, it was the perfect way for me to have a name I could carry with me to the day when I would finally come out. People wouldn’t wonder, ‘Who’s this Becky person?’, they’d go ‘Oh, Burger! We know Burger!’
So you always knew you were Becky?
Oh yes, ever since I was a little girl. When I first confessed it to my parents, I was beaten almost to death. So I kept it quiet and it’s one of the reasons I don’t talk about my family anymore.
Is it why you left home when you were just 17? I’d already ran away when I was 15 and lived behind a dumpster for a couple of months. Then I found out my parents were divorcing. My dad, who was the main source of my problems, wasn’t around anymore, and I kind of tolerated my mom so I moved back in with her. I’d already dropped out of school by then and was working at JC Penny and at the arcade. Then I entered that competition and the rest is history. I could leave home and not deal with any of that family baggage.
you travelled from West Coast to east Coast and joined Avalon hill in maryland to code Atari 2600 games. Do you remember that as a happy time?
I remember lying about my age because you have to be 18 to sign a contract, but yes I was quite happy. I was being paid to do something I’d have done for free! Avalon Hill had several properties around Maryland and I had a room in one of them. Downstairs was a kitchen and a large, open development room with this long table and we all worked there, coming up with ideas for games like Out Of Control and London Blitz. you then landed a job back in California with Atari… but only for two weeks!
Yeah, they fired everybody, including the guy that hired me! I remember being assigned my desk and a guy giving me code and telling me I was working on Robotron for the Atari 400. Then, nothing. I didn’t get any more supervision. I suppose the management knew about the layoffs. Two weeks later, I arrived at work and heard people crying and walking around with boxes. On my desk was an envelope with my pay and a note saying, ‘Thank you for your work at Atari.’ I looked round and said, ‘Erm, I guess I’ll be going then…’ to no one in particular, jumped in my pick-up truck and drove away.
At least you could put ‘programmer at Atari’ on your CV.
Actually, I got my next job at a company called Boone because I was a 2600 programmer and they wanted these Atari games converting to the C64 and VIC-20, games like Robin Hood and Chuck Norris Superkicks.
It must have been a challenge rendering the mighty Chuck Norris on such limited hardware. Well, the VIC-20 at least had 2-bit sprites, one more than the Atari, but he was still just a white silhouette of a man… [bursts into Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody] Scaramouche, Scaramouche! To be honest, all Boone cared was being able to send off the final ROMS to Xonox, the games division of K-tel, so they got paid.
Did you get paid well?
Oh no, they paid me shit. But remember, my only reference was working at JC Penny and an arcade so I thought minimum wage was what they paid for all jobs. Then we all got fired because the owner, Mike Boone, didn’t want to do videogames any more. He wants to sell popsicles at swap meets.
Sorry, you mean ice creams at what we’d call car boot sales?
Yeah. He figured people would be there on hot summer days and he did some numbers… though actually, he did do the right thing, because after that didn’t work out, he got into selling whiteboards and made millions.
This must have led to you forming Interplay?
We were all saying, ‘Well, we’ve been canned. What we gonna do? Hey, why don’t we make our own company!’ It was Brian Fargo, Troy [Worrell], Jay Patel and myself – we were the ones making the games. Fargo got this guy Chris Wells to invest $25K and that was our seed to set up Interplay. Wells-fargo… the jokes write themselves! I was kind of isolated from the business side and I had no interest in it. I just wanted to make cool stuff.
I wanted to play as a female character, and I didn’t want to be told women didn’t play these games Rebecca Heineman
Between 1984-85, you produced a trio of adventure games, which pioneered a kind of point-and-click interface, yet you don’t tend to get any credit for developing that whole genre.
I’m glad you noticed! Mind Shadow, Borrowed Time and The Tracer Sanction did well for Interplay and brought in some money to keep us going in those early years, but we never got the kind of press Sierra did. Once they did a deal with IBM to do King’s Quest and they used that to push the PC Junior, King’s Quest became a household name. They advertised everywhere and we didn’t.
you also collaborated with mike and muffy Berlyn on Tass Times in Tonetown. Were you a fan of their Infocom adventures?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I’d always wanted to work with them and that project was a dream job. Working with [them], coming up with game concepts, the wackiness of the game, the jokes we put in. I remember the tagline, ‘The closest thing to a drug trip without taking drugs.’
you seemed keen to experiment in that game.
Oh, I pioneered a lot of things in my time, like open world RPGS, point-and-click adventures, multistage animation, using a mouse with text adventures. Heck, even in Bard’s Tale on the Apple IIGS, if you equip a new instrument, the music changes.
We’d call that a dynamic soundtrack nowadays! It’s like I’m the first esports champion with Space Invaders before Billy Mitchell and Donkey Kong, then many years later, he does all the press and people think he’s the first.
you mentioned The Bard’s Tale. how did you come to be involved in that series?
Brian [Fargo] had a childhood buddy called Michael Cranford and he’d done Maze Master, which was essentially Bard’s Tale-lite. Brian talked him into becoming an independent contractor, because Cranford had no desire to become an employee of anybody, so he did a deal – he’d do the game logic and then use my tools and Interplay staff to do the art. We all contributed things like storyline to flesh out the game and Interplay had some standing by this time, so we could do a deal with Electronic Arts. Back then, getting in bed with EA was a gravy train. If they sold your game, you were almost guaranteed massive sales. It was going to be ‘win-win’.
So what happened?
Over time, I started complaining about stuff in the game design. For one, Cranford didn’t have any female characters at all. He said to me, ‘Girls don’t play these games’. I thought, ‘Ooh, if you only knew!’ Later on, he fell out with Brian Fargo and ended up doing Bard’s Tale II pretty much on his own.
But you take back control for the third instalment and that game is a real technical step up for the series.
I brought in automapping, new classes, modern weapons… I even wrote a scripting language so I could pack more in. The Bard’s Tale III is three times larger than its predecessor but only takes up one more disk.
And you introduce female characters!
I did that for me. I wanted to play as a female character and I didn’t want to be told women didn’t play these games. I swapped gender roles, too, so the villains could be women, not just men. I also added people of colour because I wanted to be inclusive. I was well aware of the issue of white privilege and I wanted to do something about it.
you carry on innovating with Dragon Wars (1989), which was supposed to be the fourth instalment of the series but required a late name change to avoid a dispute with ea. you seem to be trying to create an ‘open world’ game before that term had really been coined.
That’s right. My favourite memory of Dragon Wars is reading two different reviews. They both said they loved the game and described some of the adventures they went through… and they both wrote totally different things! The sad part is that we didn’t advertise it properly and because we had to start a new franchise and not call it The Bard’s Tale IV as we’d intended, that hurt sales.
you also worked on Wasteland, which relocated The Bard’s Tale style of rpg to a world after a devastating nuclear war.
Don’t forget the film Mad Max came out in 1984 and that was the inspiration, with the look of Ultima. Everyone was doing fantasy at the time so this postapocalyptic world with desert rangers was something different. That game was Mike Stackpole, Ken St Andre and Liz Danforth who came up with stories and game design and they used my graphics tools. Plus when it got to the photoshoot, they used my gun collection!
We read in an old interview that you always wanted to do Wasteland 2 and of course that game did eventually get made in 2014. Were you asked to work on it?
I was not approached. I would’ve liked to have worked on but I wasn’t surprised Brian [Fargo] didn’t ask
me. Let’s just say some people want to claim Interplay was a one-person show and I’m saying, ‘No, there were four founders’. When people rewrite history, that’s a problem for me.
you seem to have mixed emotions when you look back at your time at Interplay.
We grew slowly for the first five or six years and it wasn’t till we made a lot of money from Bard’s Tale II that we really started our growth. After that, it felt like we moved the company every two years because we were growing so much but you know, I did hide away in my cubicle a lot.
Were you at least making good money?
No. When I asked for a raise, they’d tell me I had stock in the company. I said, ‘Yeah but I still have to eat… and I’m sick of cold burgers from my desk drawer because I can’t afford a fridge!’ I did get more money after I threatened to quit but I don’t think they should have made me fight for it. you eventually left Interplay in the Nineties after more than 11 years there. What had changed at the company over that time?
Everything. It wasn’t the company I’d jointly founded.
I’d meet someone in the halls and try to be friendly and say, ‘Oh you must be new here, I’ve never met you’ and they would reply, deadpan, ‘I’ve been here a year.’ Then there was the constant knowledge we were being run into the ground. I would see all these games greenlit, like Stonekeep, which they said would take nine months [to develop] and I knew that would never happen. It ended up taking over five years. I was called a naysayer and not a team player – but I was right.
In the second half of the Nineties you worked on many first-person shooters. Was it good to have a change from all the adventure games you had coded in the preceding decade?
Well, at Interplay, I’d worked on Descent and on the side I’d done Wolfenstein 3D for the SNES, so it was a genre I knew about. Later I’d work on Quake II, Half-life, Medal Of Honor and lots of others…
Including the 3Do port of Doom, which sounds like being handed a poisoned chalice.
It was but 3DO were lied to as well. This guy was telling in the press about how Doom for the 3DO was almost done and it had new levels, new weapons and how it was going to be the definitive version. I just had to finish it off. 3DO was of course excited… only to discover the reality, which was nothing like what was promised. It was all lies. At least I got the game out…
you also converted Wolfenstein 3D to the 3Do, which turned out much better. Do you think the 3Do could have ever really competed with the playstation?
The hardware itself competed quite nicely. The memory architecture was really quick, the multitasking operating system was ahead of its time – at that level it was a nice
design. Where they took in out the back and shot it in the knees was the business model. Trying to sell a game console like you would a VHS recorder was suicide. Everyone in the console market, back then and still now, sells the hardware at a loss and makes their money on selling software. Samsung, Panasonic and the other manufacturers had to make all their profit on selling the machine which led to insanely high prices.
you also did conversions for the mac including Half-life, which was finished but never released. That always hurts. Imagine you’ve spent all this time making something and then three weeks before it’s due out, you’re told they’re going a different way. They give you your pay cheque, say thanks, but you know it’ll never see the light of day. Anyone would be crushed.
Come the new millennium, you work on big name franchises like Medal Of Honor and Goldeneye, which must’ve meant being part of a large team. Surely you weren’t still hiding in your cubicle?
I was starting to open up but I only went from being a triple-a introvert to the extrovert I am now when I came out to the world as to who I really was – and that was at EA. I stopped hiding away.
Were people broadly accepting of you when you transitioned to rebecca?
No. I went through a divorce and some lifelong friends turned away from me. The majority of the industry would’ve isolated me but I want to credit EA here. Some call them an evil corporation, but to me they were the best ever. They actually had a policy on what to do if you were transitioning gender and it said anyone who discriminated against me would be fired. I was like, ‘Wow! I’m going to do it!’ I was still all ready to be fired because I didn’t know if they’d follow the policy and have to look for a new career.
Did you sense you weren’t alone?
Oh there was Jessica Mulligan, Dani Bunten, Jamie Fenton, Wendy Carlos, Garry Kitchen’s sibling Jessica Stevens. I knew there were plenty of transgender coders in the industry but I also knew most of them had had bad endings. Dani committed suicide, Jessica was bullied into quitting Interplay… not everyone is trans-friendly in the industry.
The industry still lacks diversity, as you experienced working on microsoft’s kinect. [Laughs]. Yeah, I did program [on that project] but my real contribution was getting it to recognise dresses. They had code which would help [the camera] make a ‘first guess’ of what pose you were in but the problem when all the developers are men, it assumed you were wearing pants [trousers – English Ed] I was testing it, wearing a dress, and noticed it wasn’t tracking my legs at all. I brought it up and they said, ‘Oh we didn’t think of that.’ Oh, give me a break! I suppose you never think of adding in dresses if you’ve never worn one but then they started adding ‘models’ with people wearing dresses, skirts, even religious robes. That project was really fun. I’d worked on motion capture before but this idea of a camera tracking your whole body was a game-changer.
you’re still making games at, old Sküül, almost 40 years after you started in the games business. Is there a secret to your longevity?
I don’t pigeonhole myself into one genre. I’ve worked on RPGS, kids’ games, Real-time strategy games, first-person shooters, even Minecraft. What got me in to the industry in the first place was my thirst for knowledge and teaching myself how to do stuff. I’m still doing that today.
We almost forgot to ask – do you still have that Missile Command cabinet?
It lived in my house for many years until I sold it but I think I know where it is now… and I’m looking to buy it back!
It felt like we moved the company every two years because we were growing so much Rebecca Heineman