A game industry legend, Rebecca Heineman, has passed away due to cancer on November 17, 2025. She was 62 years old. Friends of Heineman have mourned her across social media.
Heineman had a prolific career in the game industry that included both game design and high-level competitive play. She won multiple Atari 2600 Space Invaders tournament, including the Atari VCS Space Invaders National Championship held in New York. She became the first national video game tournament champion in the United States.
“I had two strategies. One was “slow and steady”, which won the L.A. tournament, and the other was “kill everything on the screen ASAP,” which won me the NYC finals,” she said in a 2006 interview. “In the finals, I took an hour and 45 minutes to get the highest score. I lost one or two bases because my strategy was riskier, but faster. It paid off and I won.”
Heineman was a founder or co-founder of video game companies Interplay Productions, Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül. She worked on hundreds of games, including classics like Dragon Wars and The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate. She also wrote for Electronic Games and worked with major publishers and studios like EA and Sony. Her work touched several major parts of the gaming world.
Heineman witnessed several changes throughout her time in the game industry, including major innovations in gaming visuals. She recalled how games had become similar to movies, complete with voice actors and scripts. Her approach to game design remained steady, though.
“The easiest for me is coming up with how to implement a game,” she said in 2006. “I always envision in my head what the game should look like on the screen before a line of code is written. Then I design the code to work with that. It allows me to get the game up and running in a very short period of time.”
For more on Rebecca Heineman’s early gaming accomplishments, she was featured in a segment of the Netflix gaming documentary High Score. A GoFundMe is currently underway to assist with funeral arrangements.