Games industry legend Rebecca Ann Heineman, aka Burger Becky, has opened a GoFundMe page to help battle an “aggressive cancer”.
The 61-year-old American gaming veteran revealed they were “diagnosed with adenocarcinoma a few weeks ago”, immediately going from “an active outgoing computer nerd into a nearly bedridden cancer patient who is non stop exhausted”.
“My cancer is aggressive so to say I’m scared is an understatement, I get a chemo port installed 10/6/2025 and then they begin filling me with chemo drugs,” the game developer told followers.
“This is the fight for my life. Please help me. I want to keep creating games and comics and I need your support to beat this cancer.”
Heineman has made countless headlines over the decade as an icon of the games industry. Alongside being the first ever US video game champion of any game in 1980 to being one of the co-founders of Interplay, the brilliant programmer has continued to be a major force in games preservation to this day.
Earlier this year, Heineman revealed that she had saved the original source code of Fallout and Fallout 2 after Interplay demanding their destruction back in the early 90s.
“When I left Interplay in 1995, I had copies of every game we did. No exceptions,” she told VideoGamer earlier this year. “When I did MacPlay, which existed beyond my tenure at Interplay, every game we ported, I snapshotted. It included Fallout 1 and 2”
Alongside her work at Interplay, Heineman is also known for her legendary port of id Software’s DOOM to the ill-fated 3DO console. In recent years, the 3DO port has been heralded as a miracle as Heineman only had ten weeks to bring the game to the console, and the port’s remastered soundtrack has its own cult following. As one of her own acts of video game preservation, the game developer released the full archive for DOOM’s 3DO version on GitHub.
At the time of publication, Heineman’s GoFundMe is only a few thousand dollars away from its $50,000 goal, but in an “aggressive cancer” treatment every dollar counts. Heineman explains that “insurance is helping, but some of my treatment are out of network so I’m getting huge bills”. You can help donate to the page here.
