User:Erica.Coppola/Rebecca Heineman

Rebecca Ann Heineman is an American video game designer and programmer who was raised in Whittier, California. When she was young, she could not afford to purchase games for her Atari 2600, so she taught herself how to copy cartridges and ending up building herself a sizable pirated video game collection. Eventually, she became discontent with just copying games and reverse-engineered the console's code to understand how the games were made. She is now considered a long-time veteran of the video game industry and became a founding member of the video game company Interplay productions in 2013.

In 1980, Heineman and a friend traveled to Los Angeles to compete in a regional branch of a national Space Invaders championship. Although she did not expect to fall under the top 100 contestants, she won the competition. Later that year, she also won the championship in New York. Heineman is hence considered to be the first national video game tournament champion.