The new Netflix documentary series about the early video game industry, High Score, features the winner of the first-ever national championship for a video game, who became a lauded game developer and entrepreneur. She’s also a transgender woman who’s now a mom and a grandma.
Rebecca Heineman won the National Space Invaders Championship in 1980—the first time any video game had ever held a national championship. She went on to a storied career in the video game industry, working at giants like Microsoft, Sony, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Amazon but also founding or co-founding multiple companies of her own. “I’ve contributed code to over 200 video game titles for every video game platform,” she adds at her website. She’s currently the CEO of Olde Sküül.
More fully, she says, “I’m a computer programmer, game designer, writer, engineer, pilot, nurse, pastry chef, markswoman, loving mother even though my kids have grown up and moved on.” She’s on the board of GLAAD, which notes on its website that she’s now also a grandma. She’s married to Jennell Jaquays, another award-winning game developer (and another transgender parent).
Heineman doesn’t talk about parenting in the documentary, but in a 2010 interview with the game development website Gamasutra, she shared this family memory:
I have kids, and they always loved it when mom cooked them stuff. I had this cake recipe I did called “Death by Chocolate,” and right now it’s a favorite for my son Jacob and my son William—every birthday, I have to bake them that cake. It’s called “Death by Chocolate” because you start with chocolate fudge cake mix, and as I pour it in a Bundt cake pan, and then I put M&Ms or little chocolate baking bits, then another layer of cake mix, until the pan is full.
Then I bake it, take it out, and ice it with chocolate icing and then put Hershey’s Kisses all over the cake or sprinkle it with M&Ms. So, essentially just one bite would make you gain five pounds. My sons can’t get enough of it, and I’m like, crap. There goes my diet.
Sweet bytes and sweet bites—she does it all.
Heineman is mostly in Episode 1 of High Score (with just a couple of brief moments elsewhere)—but there are queer video game creators in several episodes, and a whole segment in Episode 3 on one of the earliest gay- and lesbian-themed games. The rest is a fun look at many of the games we grown-ups will remember from our childhoods, including Tetris, Pac-Man (and Ms. Pac-Man), Colossal Cave Adventure, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., and of course Space Invaders—but with stories about their creators and influences that you may not have known. It’s a fun, high-energy documentary series (if occasionally a little disjointed) and well worth watching if you have any interest in video games, have kids who are interested in video games, or simply have any sense of nostalgia for the 80s and early 90s. Those haircuts! (If you plan to watch with younger children, be aware that the last two episodes show some of the more violent games like Mortal Kombat and DOOM; know your kids and use your own judgment.)