As the winner of the very first video game tournament, Rebecca Ann “Burger” Heineman became part of gaming history. But she didn’t stop there. She went on to co-found a major software company of the early ‘80s, worked on incredibly influential games, and pioneered a genre of adventure games that still has fans today.

As a teenager, Heineman couldn’t afford to buy game cartridges for her Atari 2600. So she decided to make her own.

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This teen fought for the right to go to homecoming with another boy. In 1980.

“I was able to teach myself how to copy cartridges and amassed a huge video game collection. Not satisfied with copying, I reverse-engineered how the games worked,” she said in the book Women In Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play by Meagan Marie.

At the time, one of her favorites was Space Invaders. A friend noticed her high scores and, in 1980, took Heineman to a regional championship. When she won, she then went to New York for the nationals, where she won again, becoming the very first person to win any video game championship — even if she was actually gunning for second place. 

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“I wanted the Atari 800 computer that was the second-place prize… oh, gosh—I really wanted one,” she said in a 2010 interview. “Because the grand prize was a stand-up arcade game, and I didn’t want that.”

She won the video game cabinet instead. But her win also gave her a connection to the editors of Electronic Games magazine and a foot in the door of the industry. After a few months writing for the publication, she mentioned to one of her bosses that she knew how to program for the 2600. He recommended her to the board game company Avalon Hill, which was starting a video game division. She told Avalon Hill she was 18, but she has since said she was actually only 14.

At Avalon Hill, she worked on two games: her first published game, London Blitz – an early game with first-person sequences – and Out of Control, a space game. But by the time London Blitz was out, Heineman had moved on. Working as a consultant, she learned how to program not just for the 2600, but also for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and IBM PC. 

It was around this time that she got the name “Burger.” While working at a software company making games like Chuck Norris Super Kicks, she said she was not making a lot of money. But fortunately, there was a nearby fast-food restaurant selling hamburgers for 29 cents. 

“So I’d buy a bag of twenty of them,” she told Gama Sutra. “Blow six bucks, get twenty burgers, go to my office, and put them in a drawer. I was too cheap to buy a refrigerator – well, really too broke. Every so often I’d open the drawer and eat a burger.”

This habit grossed out her officemate, which led to a running office gag (no pun intended) and ultimately a nickname. 

But there was another reason she preferred being called Burger. 

“I had a personal reason for that. I’m transgender, so I had a different name back then and I hated it,” she told Retro Gamer in 2019. “I knew it was only a pen name and l’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 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!’”

In 1983, she and four others co-founded Interplay Productions. Though Heineman is no longer there, Interplay Entertainment (as it’s now known) is still around and best known for creating Fallout and publishing Baldur’s Gate. While those are big names now, Interplay had huge hits out of the gate, like Battle Chess and the seminal post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland. 

In addition to Wasteland, one of Heineman’s favorite games to work on was 1989’s Dragon Wars. A fantasy role-playing game, it was meant to be the next in the Bard’s Tale series of games, but due to business shenanigans – though Interplay created the game, EA Games owned the trademarks and wouldn’t license the name – it was given a new name and a couple hastily added dragons.

“So I had to come up with, at the last minute, a story that had a dragon in it, and put little quips every now and then that said there were dragon wars in the past. But since the game was only a month or two away from shipping, I couldn’t re-do the actual ending of the game to make a battle of the dragons. So, it’s a running joke that we shipped a game called Dragon Wars with hardly any dragon in it,” she said, adding that it’s “one of the titles I’m most proud of for my entire career.”

Heineman is also one of the original creators of the point-and-click adventure. Though publishers like Sierra On-Line (of the King’s Quest franchise) and LucasArts (of Monkey Island fame) became most associated with the format, 1986’s Tass Times in Tonetown is one of the very first games to feature this gameplay mechanic. Although the genre’s heyday was in the 1990s, popular point-and-click games are still being made today, like the Duck Detective series.

Heineman has done a lot in her life – we haven’t even mentioned her comics work, her time spent on the board of directors at GLAAD, or how she’s coded for over 200 video game titles across platforms. Someone could write a phonebook-sized volume about all of her accomplishments. 

However, right now, she’s in need of help. At the beginning of October, she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and is requesting aid via GoFundMe to cover her medical bills.

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