design. Where they took in out the back and shot it in
the knees was the business model. Trying to sell a game
console like you would a VHS recorder was suicide.
Everyone in the console market, back then and still now,
sells the hardware at a loss and makes their money on
selling software. Samsung, Panasonic and the other
manufacturers had to make all their profit on selling the
machine which led to insanely high prices.
You also did conversions for the Mac including
Half-life, which was finished but never released.
That always hurts. Imagine you’ve spent all this time
making something and then three weeks before it’s due
out, you’re told they’re going a different way. They give
you your pay cheque, say thanks, but you know it’ll never
see the light of day. Anyone would be crushed.
Come the new millennium, you work on big name
franchises like Medal Of Honor and GoldenEye,
which must’ve meant being part of a large team.
Surely you weren’t still hiding in your cubicle?
I was starting to open up but I only went from being a
triple-A introvert to the extrovert I am now when I came
out to the world as to who I really was – and that was at
EA. I stopped hiding away.
Were people broadly accepting of you when you
transitioned to Rebecca?
No. I went through a divorce and some lifelong friends
turned away from me. The majority of the industry
would’ve isolated me but I want to credit EA here.
Some call them an evil corporation, but to me they
were the best ever. They actually had a policy on
what to do if you were transitioning gender and it said
anyone who discriminated against me would be fired. I
was like, ‘Wow! I’m going to do it!’ I was still all ready
to be fired because I didn’t know if they’d follow the
policy and have to look for a new career.Did you sense you weren’t alone?
Oh there was Jessica Mulligan, Dani Bunten, Jamie
Fenton, Wendy Carlos, Garry Kitchen’s sibling Jessica
Stevens. I knew there were plenty of transgender coders
in the industry but I also knew most of them had had
bad endings. Dani committed suicide, Jessica was
bullied into quitting Interplay... not everyone is
trans-friendly in the industry.The industry still lacks diversity, as you
experienced working on Microsoft’s Kinect.
[Laughs]. Yeah, I did program [on that project] but my
real contribution was getting it to recognise dresses.
They had code which would help [the camera] make a
‘first guess’ of what pose you were in but the problem
when all the developers are men, it assumed you were
wearing pants [trousers – English Ed] I was testing it,
wearing a dress, and noticed it wasn’t tracking my legs
at all. I brought it up and they said, ‘Oh we didn’t think of
that.’ Oh, give me a break! I suppose you never think of
adding in dresses if you’ve never worn one but then they
started adding ‘models’ with people wearing dresses,
skirts, even religious robes. That project was really fun.
I’d worked on motion capture before but this idea of a
camera tracking your whole body was a game-changer.You’re still making games at, Old Sküül, almost 40
years after you started in the games business. Is
there a secret to your longevity?
I don’t pigeonhole myself into one genre. I’ve
worked on RPGs, kids’ games, Real-time
strategy games, first-person shooters, even
Minecraft. What got me in to the industry in
the first place was my thirst for knowledge
and teaching myself how to do stuff. I’m still
doing that today.We almost forgot to ask – do you still
have that Missile Command cabinet?
It lived in my house for many years until I sold
it but I think I know where it is now... and I’m
looking to buy it back!»^ [PS2] Becky worked on some big-name franchises at EA, such as
Medal of Honor: European Assault.It felt like we moved the
company every two
years because we were
growing so much
Rebecca Heineman»[
Med
»^ Becky’s Half-Life por t for the mac was never
commercially released.Becky rummages through
our mailbagYOU ASK
THE QUESTIONS
Yes! My character was Halifax and she
was a level 10 Mage, and a bunch of
us at Interplay would have Dungeons &
Dragons game nights.Every new generation was like starting
over. Crack open the books, start
learning again and come up with new
ways to play games. It’s the same with
the Switch right now!It’s basically a tech demo, but yes I still
have the source code. The plan was to
release it on cartridge for the C64 and
VIC-20, but Boone went bust before I
finished it though they did make boxes
and I have one. It was akin to Star Wars
by Atari, it had that 3D line drawn look,
and there were towers to shoot but you
could fly in multiple directions.It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s so easy
to enter the market using Unity or
Unreal, anyone with a game idea and art
skills can put something together. Some
of the most innovative games ever
made are coming out, but there’s also
a plethora of garbage and the market is
saturated. People making great games
are going out of business.MERMAN: Did you play tabletop
role-playing games?NIGHTSHADOWPT: How hard
was the transition between
console/computer generations?FGASKING: Have you got
anything left of the unreleased
Final Eclipse?NIGHTSHADOWPT: How do
you view the resurgence of the
‘bedroom coder’ and small game
dev teams?RETRO GAMER | 95IN THE CHAIR: REBECCA HEINEMAN