Huge loss to the community. She was, by all accounts, an amazing programmer. I remember when she uploaded the source code of her Doom 3DO port she indicated that she had to write her own string lib because the base one sucked:
> I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
I can't even imagine the level of skill required to just say, "Fine, I'll write MY OWN string lib!" while chasing a deadline.
As an aside...I wonder what will happen to her personal artifacts. There was a media blitz awhile back when Tim Cain said he doesn't have the original source code to Fallout because he was "ordered to destroy it" by Interplay when he left. But Becky then chimed in to say that she did have a surviving copy, because she was a founder. [0] I hope someone else on her behalf would be able to continue that effort, but I worry that with her death, Bethesda would assert that no one else has "legal standing" to do so.
Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era, often pushing the hardware in unusual ways. This article is one of my favorites, detailing the wacky tricks she used to get Another World's 3D rendering system running acceptably on a Super Nintendo
She also somehow pulled off the port of Doom to the hopelessly underpowered hardware of the 3DO in just a few weeks, after others had tried and failed for much longer than that. The final release had a reduced viewport and a bad framerate, but the background music was great (recorded with a band and stored as audio tracks on the game CD).
Also, 62 years is much too young! And one month from diagnosis (because of being short of breath) to dying is really rough - although there's a lot of progress on cancer treatment, some forms have symptoms at such a late stage that they're unfortunately still a death sentence...
I will never get over the company CEO sending here PNGs of new weapon models and saying, essentially, "Yeah so you can just copy & paste these into the game, right?"
Please no. It would be impossible to decide the cutoff for who deserves it. Loud communities would bring drama when their favourite person doesn't get pinned. A black strip might be fine, though.
Having a bard in your party let you choose a soundtrack and their songs brought magical effects. For example, the Rhyme of Duotime let your party attack more frequently in combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oR4j7w4FIY
The first trilogy (including BT3) was also remastered about 7 years ago and released on Steam, it's like $15 and has many quality of life improvements.
In middle school, a friend and I 'cracked' that decoder ring by copying all the info by hand on to paper so we could both play the game from one store bought copy because we were poor. I don't think we ever finished the game, but it's still one of my happiest early gaming memories.
They remastered all three of the first Bard's Tale games a few years ago and released them on Steam with many quality of life improvements-- I bought the set without a second thought even though I know I will probably never take the time to play it all the way through. I've spent a few dozen hours on it so far, though.
Admittedly I didn't dive much into this to get the full context, but it's saddening to me that a legendary game designer had a GoFundMe. I was hoping achieving that level of status in a traditionally well-paid industry would leave one well off, financially.
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.
I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”
Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.
For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.
Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.
It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still end up shuttering and being no better off than your average joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way. 200k isn't mindblowing for a software engineer, but it's well beyond "average joe" range at that point.
I'm that cog. Or at least, was. Situations like this make me thing a lot about the state of the industry and where I lie in life.
I'm wondering if she actually got the fundraiser money, considering how quickly this moved - the last update implied it would have to go to her funeral, and I hope it pays for the bills or helps her family.
The first "Boom & Bust" episode of Netflix's series "High Score" series told the story of her winning the first Space Invaders U.S. national championship as a kid.
Rest in peace, Burger Becky! I really enjoyed her interview with CoRecursive a few years ago about porting DOOM to the 3DO[1] and highly recommend a listen.
What a true legend. The amount of people she has touched with her work is enormous.
Feeling a bit of regret. I feel like I made a poor first impression on Rebecca when I first met her a few years back at VCF East. I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event. I didn't know about the cancer. Thought I would have another chance. This is happening more and more in my life. :/
Let us cherish all the great moments that she helped bring to us.
I was lucky to catch some of Becky's livestreams on YouTube over the years.
More than a brilliant programmer she was truly a kind soul. She never approached topics with any kind of ego. Just a joy and love for the things she'd worked on and the people she'd worked with
Very sad news. This one hit pretty hard for me as not only was she so awesome and contributed so much to so many great games, but the short timeline between "oh dang I have cancer and we're fighting it" to, well, today... was just way too short :(
You are not alone being hit hard by the pace of the cancer's progression. Dr Makis talks about his shocks lately as an oncologist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIYQCjB_NU
You are not alone. I can only think that her post about being very vulnerable after chemo from immune system supression made me realize how lucky you have to be to beat cancer with chemo.
As a retro-enthusiast, I was captivated by the stories she shared in her interviews,
particularly about working on the cancelled Half Life port to Classic Mac OS (supposedly it even ran on 68k Macintoshes, How amazing is that !?).
She said that she still had a CD of the gold master on her shelf.
I really fear that work may never see the light of day now...
Offtopic: several of the embedded Bluesky posts at the end of the article show "The author of the quoted post has requested their posts not be displayed on external sites." Seems not to phase the PC Gamer "journalists".
[0] is a good article about this; not least that this has been happening since at least 1889 (to the point where I'd say we could now probably consider it a valid alternate spelling.)
These are quote-posts; the quote-post isn't protected but the quoted-post is. Bad choice by whoever wrote the article (in fairness the default Bluesky interface doesn't make this particularly clear), but nothing is being displayed that shouldn't be displayed.
Im inclined to blame the US healthcare system. It looks like a gofundme was setup to pay for her cancer treatment. A sensible system a) wouldn’t need patients to pay for treatment and b) might have caught it earlier through regular screening
Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Without such evidence your post reads more like propagandizing a death for political purposes than an honest argument.
> Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Do you have any evidence that it wasn't?
I honestly don't know if earlier detection was possible, or would have helped her out or not. What I can tell you is that given the state of health care in this country, you can bet that my default assumption would be "yes" and "yes" until proven otherwise.
Starting with the assumption of "no" gives our system more slack than it deserves.
Never heard of her and given what she is known for it sounds like she contributed to destroying the gaming community by inserting your viewpoints into an area where they weren't wanted. Part of the group that destroyed my childhood.
Aww I’m very sad to hear this. She was close friends to a partner of mine and I met her about ten years ago through that connection. She seemed to be a lovely person.
Wow. What an impactful person. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I did know about her till her death though I've played many of the games mentioned in the WP article about her. RIP.
What a horribly cold-hearted and tactless thing to say. From what I've read, she got diagnosed a month ago. Is our treatment here in Canada so damn good that we'd have been able to save her? I doubt it.
Huge loss to the community. She was, by all accounts, an amazing programmer. I remember when she uploaded the source code of her Doom 3DO port she indicated that she had to write her own string lib because the base one sucked:
> I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do
I can't even imagine the level of skill required to just say, "Fine, I'll write MY OWN string lib!" while chasing a deadline.
As an aside...I wonder what will happen to her personal artifacts. There was a media blitz awhile back when Tim Cain said he doesn't have the original source code to Fallout because he was "ordered to destroy it" by Interplay when he left. But Becky then chimed in to say that she did have a surviving copy, because she was a founder. [0] I hope someone else on her behalf would be able to continue that effort, but I worry that with her death, Bethesda would assert that no one else has "legal standing" to do so.
[0] https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/fallout-1-2-source-cod...
Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era, often pushing the hardware in unusual ways. This article is one of my favorites, detailing the wacky tricks she used to get Another World's 3D rendering system running acceptably on a Super Nintendo
https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/
Rest in piece, you absolute legend.
She also somehow pulled off the port of Doom to the hopelessly underpowered hardware of the 3DO in just a few weeks, after others had tried and failed for much longer than that. The final release had a reduced viewport and a bad framerate, but the background music was great (recorded with a band and stored as audio tracks on the game CD).
https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do
Also, 62 years is much too young! And one month from diagnosis (because of being short of breath) to dying is really rough - although there's a lot of progress on cancer treatment, some forms have symptoms at such a late stage that they're unfortunately still a death sentence...
Gonna link SSFF's enjoyable telling of the 3DO port story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxF1_wg2d_Q
I will never get over the company CEO sending here PNGs of new weapon models and saying, essentially, "Yeah so you can just copy & paste these into the game, right?"
Today I learned...
"Super Fami-Com ("FAMIly COMputer")"
Doh!
It was a sequel to the Famicom.
Meta: I think such black strip moments should be pinned at top of the hacker news while it lasts.
Please no. It would be impossible to decide the cutoff for who deserves it. Loud communities would bring drama when their favourite person doesn't get pinned. A black strip might be fine, though.
Many years ago I played one of her works, Bard's Tale 3: Thief of Fate and enjoyed it very much.
It was a masterful blend of RPG, dungeon crawl, and puzzles and had a memorable soundtrack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru5kg35dNso
Having a bard in your party let you choose a soundtrack and their songs brought magical effects. For example, the Rhyme of Duotime let your party attack more frequently in combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oR4j7w4FIY
BT3 is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_The_Bards_Tale_3_-_Thief_O...
The first trilogy (including BT3) was also remastered about 7 years ago and released on Steam, it's like $15 and has many quality of life improvements.
The original Bard's Tale was my first RPG and I've been hooked ever since.
She was originally chosen to do a remaster of the series. This was eventually reassigned to another publisher.
If you purchase Bards Tale 4 you get the remastered 1,2, and 3 for free.
I have played BT 1 every year or so since the late 80s.
BT3 was wonderful, lots of nostalgia for me. Sad to hear of her passing.
ahh i have fond memories of this game... and the silly anti piracy attempts (decoder ring) they shipped it with.
In middle school, a friend and I 'cracked' that decoder ring by copying all the info by hand on to paper so we could both play the game from one store bought copy because we were poor. I don't think we ever finished the game, but it's still one of my happiest early gaming memories.
They remastered all three of the first Bard's Tale games a few years ago and released them on Steam with many quality of life improvements-- I bought the set without a second thought even though I know I will probably never take the time to play it all the way through. I've spent a few dozen hours on it so far, though.
It seems Bard's Tale 3 can be played on the DosBox emulator:
https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=188&letter=B
... which is available for many platforms, including Windows and Linux:
https://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1
although the latest version of DosBox seems to be from 2019, so maybe others can suggest a more actively-maintained emulator.
DOSBox-X is a port that is actively developed and has many features missing in vanilla DOSBox.
There are a few other ones as well. DOSBox Staging is one. Magic DOSBox seems to be the most popular on Android. There is some iOS port as well.
Admittedly I didn't dive much into this to get the full context, but it's saddening to me that a legendary game designer had a GoFundMe. I was hoping achieving that level of status in a traditionally well-paid industry would leave one well off, financially.
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.
I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”
Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
As a lucky European, I have US labeled as “richest third world country”.
> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.
For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.
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Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.
How'd the theme song to that show go again?
Cancer is expensive everywhere, the difference is who pays for it.
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I was hoping one wouldn't need to be well off to get treatment for an illness, but that's the US for you.
Cancer and US Medical Care has a tendency to drain any savings you have. Also, it was sudden so it’s not like she was ready to retire at all.
The games industry is not traditionally well paid, unfortunately.
It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still end up shuttering and being no better off than your average joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way. 200k isn't mindblowing for a software engineer, but it's well beyond "average joe" range at that point.
I'm that cog. Or at least, was. Situations like this make me thing a lot about the state of the industry and where I lie in life.
This. It's consistently lower-paying than the rest of the software industry.
Video games are an art form, the downside is they pay like one too.
Not just legendary game designer, but co-founder of a game studio and publisher (Interplay).
I'm wondering if she actually got the fundraiser money, considering how quickly this moved - the last update implied it would have to go to her funeral, and I hope it pays for the bills or helps her family.
This breaks my heart, I will miss Burger Becky, she was the sweetest kindest person and a legendary programmer.
https://www.burgerbecky.com/becky.htm
The first "Boom & Bust" episode of Netflix's series "High Score" series told the story of her winning the first Space Invaders U.S. national championship as a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Score_(TV_series)
I knew I'd seen her somewhere before, that was it!
"Legend" barely begins to describe. She is up there with the Carmacks et al.
She was probably the first programmer I knew by name as a kid, following the games industry as a kid.
Rest in peace, Burger Becky! I really enjoyed her interview with CoRecursive a few years ago about porting DOOM to the 3DO[1] and highly recommend a listen.
[1]: https://corecursive.com/doomed-to-fail-with-burger-becky/
>Heineman's cancer fundraiser is now collecting for her funeral.
Am I crazy or does that sentence have, I don't know how to explain it, the 'rhythm' of a joke? Feels like accidental rhyming, a mark of bad writing?
It unfortunately reads a bit like an unintentional punchline, yes.
Sounds like it’s trying to be ironic
What a true legend. The amount of people she has touched with her work is enormous.
Feeling a bit of regret. I feel like I made a poor first impression on Rebecca when I first met her a few years back at VCF East. I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event. I didn't know about the cancer. Thought I would have another chance. This is happening more and more in my life. :/
Let us cherish all the great moments that she helped bring to us.
> I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event.
Go visit a pulmonologist and get a diagnosis. Getting one and starting on a CPAP was life-changing for me.
Im reading this wearing a CPAP.
I was lucky to catch some of Becky's livestreams on YouTube over the years.
More than a brilliant programmer she was truly a kind soul. She never approached topics with any kind of ego. Just a joy and love for the things she'd worked on and the people she'd worked with
Yeah, that's the impression I got from everyone who's saddened by her loss.
We lost a legend.
She was responsible for a large part of my early gaming years, without me even knowing it. Another legendary account retired.
Very sad news. This one hit pretty hard for me as not only was she so awesome and contributed so much to so many great games, but the short timeline between "oh dang I have cancer and we're fighting it" to, well, today... was just way too short :(
You are not alone being hit hard by the pace of the cancer's progression. Dr Makis talks about his shocks lately as an oncologist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIYQCjB_NU
You are not alone. I can only think that her post about being very vulnerable after chemo from immune system supression made me realize how lucky you have to be to beat cancer with chemo.
My understanding is the cancer had already metastasized by the time it was discovered. Chemo was always a hail Mary sadly :(
As a retro-enthusiast, I was captivated by the stories she shared in her interviews, particularly about working on the cancelled Half Life port to Classic Mac OS (supposedly it even ran on 68k Macintoshes, How amazing is that !?). She said that she still had a CD of the gold master on her shelf. I really fear that work may never see the light of day now...
Offtopic: several of the embedded Bluesky posts at the end of the article show "The author of the quoted post has requested their posts not be displayed on external sites." Seems not to phase the PC Gamer "journalists".
It's faze, not phase. It's a common mistake.
[0] is a good article about this; not least that this has been happening since at least 1889 (to the point where I'd say we could now probably consider it a valid alternate spelling.)
[0] https://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001166.... (no, I've no idea why they're behind the wrong subdomain certificate)
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These are quote-posts; the quote-post isn't protected but the quoted-post is. Bad choice by whoever wrote the article (in fairness the default Bluesky interface doesn't make this particularly clear), but nothing is being displayed that shouldn't be displayed.
Looks to me like it's the quoted post that's not to be displayed, not the post itself.
Im inclined to blame the US healthcare system. It looks like a gofundme was setup to pay for her cancer treatment. A sensible system a) wouldn’t need patients to pay for treatment and b) might have caught it earlier through regular screening
Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Without such evidence your post reads more like propagandizing a death for political purposes than an honest argument.
> Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Do you have any evidence that it wasn't?
I honestly don't know if earlier detection was possible, or would have helped her out or not. What I can tell you is that given the state of health care in this country, you can bet that my default assumption would be "yes" and "yes" until proven otherwise.
Starting with the assumption of "no" gives our system more slack than it deserves.
Another one of these? Jeez.
Whether you're right or not, it doesn't matter - this is not the time or place to bring this up.
So nobody dies or cancer in places with universal healthcare?
Something doesn't have to be perfect to be better
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Never heard of her and given what she is known for it sounds like she contributed to destroying the gaming community by inserting your viewpoints into an area where they weren't wanted. Part of the group that destroyed my childhood.
I'd heard the 3DO doom port story linked here before and it is absolutely wild stuff. Legend.
RIP, https://www.mobygames.com/person/343/rebecca-ann-heineman/
Aww I’m very sad to hear this. She was close friends to a partner of mine and I met her about ten years ago through that connection. She seemed to be a lovely person.
Running x86 server architecture in software development. PC Gamer's obituary claims she was debugged.
Wow. What an impactful person. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I did know about her till her death though I've played many of the games mentioned in the WP article about her. RIP.
RIP, Burger.
I played BT1, BT2, and BT3 for hours and hours.
Pop-up when pressing back on mobile that stopped returning to HN.
Sheesh, the mobile web is really predatory. Good that I don’t use it much.
Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era
How odd:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960849
Good catch!
The first time I became aware of her was in the "Another World 101" series, about her SNES port:
https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index...
Damn I knew she had cancer but never thought it is so quick.
“We have gone on so many adventures together! But, into the great unknown! I go first!!!“
Such a legend. RIP.
rip burger o7
What an amazing career. RIP.
@dang could we have a black banner please?
For posterity, we have gotten a black banner. Farewell to a true hacker. She will be missed.
RIP Burger. Thanks for all the epic games and stories.
Also, would it be possible to make the black banner a hyperlink that points directly at the HN submission?
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What a horribly cold-hearted and tactless thing to say. From what I've read, she got diagnosed a month ago. Is our treatment here in Canada so damn good that we'd have been able to save her? I doubt it.
Yes there's a good chance it would have been detected in advance during a routine visit in Canada.
The USA is perfectly capable of having good healthcare for everybody, like Canada, but elections have consequences.
Again, Health Insurance Companies in the USA have blood soaked hands.
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I doubt anyone can answer that so why even ask it?
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