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AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Grown children of a certain age know this is the sound of Space Invaders. For Rebecca Heineman, this was the sound of a new life.
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RASCOE: She was a teenager in the late '70s, just as the first video game boom was underway. Like a lot of kids back then, she couldn't afford to buy Atari game cartridges. But unlike a lot of kids back then, she had the skills to reverse engineer and pirate her own.
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RASCOE: By 1980, Heineman had mastered the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders. And as she recalled in the Netflix documentary "High Score," she found her way to the first ever U.S. Space Invaders championship in New York City. She was far from home and just a kid up against some of the best gamers in the country.
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REBECCA HEINEMAN: I was 16, and I've never left home. And now I'm going to New York City by myself to play a Space Invaders video game contest.
RASCOE: She was scared, but everyone else should have been scared of her. After a grueling two-hour final, Heineman finally was declared winner, the first formally recognized video game champion in U.S. history - a big victory, but also way too much time staring at pixelated 8-bit aliens on the screen.
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HEINEMAN: With that, I just reached over, grabbed the cartridge, yanked it out and just put it down, and I'm, like, I don't want to play this game ever again (laughter) in my life.
RASCOE: Heineman was born in Whittier, California. She died last week at the age of 62, and she's remembered as a trailblazer, not just with a controller in her hand. In 1983, she co-founded Interplay Entertainment.
TROY WORRELL: All of us, at that point, were extremely young. I was actually the oldest one. I was the only one that could buy alcohol.
RASCOE: That's co-founder Troy Worrell. The company they built together put out classic titles like Fallout and Bard's Tale.
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RASCOE: Worrell says Heineman could take your good idea and make it better. And she was always generous with her knowledge.
WORRELL: She was very open and willing to teach people and help them progress in their abilities and their knowledge.
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RASCOE: In the early 2000s, she became a pioneer again, coming out as transgender. Later, Heineman served on the board of the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD. Sarah Kate Ellis is the group's president and CEO.
SARAH KATE ELLIS: She really used gaming as a platform because so many marginalized people find refuge in gaming, and she put those two things together and fought for all the voices - women, trans folks - across the board.
RASCOE: After Interplay, Heineman founded other gaming companies and kept up her advocacy. She had her own YouTube channel where she would tell stories about the industry and her life. In her last post, just a couple of months ago, she announced she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Even then, she remained upbeat.
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HEINEMAN: Whether I have 20 weeks left to go or 20 years left to go, that's something that - it's out of my hands. I'm going to do my best to fight this, to stay alive and stay annoying everyone around you for as long as I can.
RASCOE: Rebecca Heineman was many things, but to friends and people she touched, she was far from annoying. As one game developer wrote on social media, her achievements were great and so, too, was her kindness.
(SOUNDBITE OF HARRIS HELLER'S "MOTION OF THE EDGE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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