An Apple II user group drew my attention to an active GoFundMe for Rebecca Ann Heineman, AKA ‘Burger’ Becky. Heineman, whose career in videogame development – including ports of games like Tass Times in Tonetown, Mindshadow, Wolfenstein 3D and Out of this World – has been long and amazing, is fighting cancer and unable to keep up with the health expenses.
As an Australian I feel queasy seeing citizens of one of the richest countries in the world forced to go and ask individuals for money to pay multi tens of thousands of dollars health bills. This shouldn’t be happening. Since it is and Heineman’s enriched my life (and once wrote me a great help email when I emailed Logicware for help with Killing Time in the 1990s) I have put in.
“Universal healthcare” being dirty words to a critical mass of my fellow country folk is one of many reasons I’m ashamed of my homeland… and while I’ve never heard of this person, I wish I could afford to help her and others in such dire straits.
From her wikipedia entry:
" When she was young, she could not afford to purchase games for her Atari 2600, so she taught herself how to copy cartridges and built herself a sizable pirated video game collection. Eventually, she became discontented with just copying games and reverse-engineered the console’s code to understand how the games were made."
Wow, serious respect. My first console was an Atari 2600 (VCS) and we didn’t have a lot of money either, but I would have had (and still have) no clue how to go about doing that.
Edit: Eyes his original Atari 2600 sitting on the other side of the room…