Rebecca Heineman, co-founder of video game company Interplay Entertainment, has died at the age of 62 Rock Paper Shotgun According to the report, his friends and colleagues from the industry shared the news on their social media accounts. According to Heineman’s GoFundMe campaign, he was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma a few months ago. In his last update he revealed that “All further treatments [were] Heineman’s last post on Instagram was a tribute to his wife Janelle Jacques, who died in 2024 due to complications from Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Heineman won the Atari 2600 Space Invaders Championship in 1980, before he was offered a job as a programmer by Avalon Hill Games at the age of 16. He then co-founded Interplay as Interplay Productions in 1983 with Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, and Troy Worrell. Under Interplay they designed The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate among other sports. In 1999, he founded Contraband Entertainment, which worked on a Mac OS port aliens vs hunters 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.