Huge loss to the community. She was, by all accounts, an amazing programmer. I remember when she uploaded the source code of her Doom 3DO port she indicated that she had to write her own string lib because the base one sucked:
> I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
I can't even imagine the level of skill required to just say, "Fine, I'll write MY OWN string lib!" while chasing a deadline.
As an aside...I wonder what will happen to her personal artifacts. There was a media blitz awhile back when Tim Cain said he doesn't have the original source code to Fallout because he was "ordered to destroy it" by Interplay when he left. But Becky then chimed in to say that she did have a surviving copy, because she was a founder. [0] I hope someone else on her behalf would be able to continue that effort, but I worry that with her death, Bethesda would assert that no one else has "legal standing" to do so.
Burgerlib is a low level operating system library that presents a common API that operates the same on numerous mobile, desktop, and video game platforms. By using the library, it will allow near instant porting of an application written on one platform to another.
Burgerlib is not meant to be considered an engine, it's a framework on to which an engine can be created on top of and by using the common API, be compatible on dozens of platforms.
Filenames and paths are standardized, all text is UTF-8 regardless of platform. Display, input, audio, music, math, timers, atomics, and typedefs operate the same.
"Hard" by whose definition? I had to implement those in MIPS assembly and write a hash table in x86 assembly in school but I don't think I could do that today without a good deal of refresh. I'd venture to say that most software developers today wouldn't even know where to begin because most software written today targets a VM that doesn't expose pointer arithmetic.
Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era, often pushing the hardware in unusual ways. This article is one of my favorites, detailing the wacky tricks she used to get Another World's 3D rendering system running acceptably on a Super Nintendo
She also somehow pulled off the port of Doom to the hopelessly underpowered hardware of the 3DO in just a few weeks, after others had tried and failed for much longer than that. The final release had a reduced viewport and a bad framerate, but the background music was great (recorded with a band and stored as audio tracks on the game CD).
Also, 62 years is much too young! And one month from diagnosis (because of being short of breath) to dying is really rough - although there's a lot of progress on cancer treatment, some forms have symptoms at such a late stage that they're unfortunately still a death sentence...
I will never get over the company CEO sending here PNGs of new weapon models and saying, essentially, "Yeah so you can just copy & paste these into the game, right?"
Back when Blizzard was still Silicon & Synapse, we got Rebecca's source code to Another World SNES from Interplay to use for a game we would develop, and they would publish, and I was the engine programmer.
I remember reading the source code, which was ... sparsely documented, and wondering what was going on. Like "you're writing to the DMA registers?!?"
The code was amazing, because it has has to draw polygons into 8x8 pixels cells that are stored in planar format at 60FPS. On a 3.5 Mhz processor. Blew my mind.
Incidentally, the game was called "Nightmare", and later became "Blackthorne", which was released for SNES, Genesis, and PC.
Having a bard in your party let you choose a soundtrack and their songs brought magical effects. For example, the Rhyme of Duotime let your party attack more frequently in combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oR4j7w4FIY
Interesting, I didn't know BT3 was by a different author, it definitely had its own vibe distinct from the first two, which this guy wrote (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cranford). I liked them all though.
The steam remasters are incredibly faithful to the originals - right down to the timing and flow of the turn-based combat. Makes me wonder if they are emulating the original code somehow.
The first trilogy (including BT3) was also remastered about 7 years ago and released on Steam, it's like $15 and has many quality of life improvements.
In middle school, a friend and I 'cracked' that decoder ring by copying all the info by hand on to paper so we could both play the game from one store bought copy because we were poor. I don't think we ever finished the game, but it's still one of my happiest early gaming memories.
They remastered all three of the first Bard's Tale games a few years ago and released them on Steam with many quality of life improvements-- I bought the set without a second thought even though I know I will probably never take the time to play it all the way through. I've spent a few dozen hours on it so far, though.
The first "Boom & Bust" episode of Netflix's series "High Score" series told the story of her winning the first Space Invaders U.S. national championship as a kid.
I had the honor and pleasure of meeting her in 2018 at PRGE (Portland Retro Gaming Expo). She was sitting at a signing table after being on a panel. When it got to be my turn, I asked her if I could get a photo instead of a signature. She quickly said yes and I bent down to get into the frame. She was extremely kind and always cracking jokes. What I didn't know until I got my phone back and later looked closely was that she'd given me rabbit ears in the picture.
I was lucky to catch some of Becky's livestreams on YouTube over the years.
More than a brilliant programmer she was truly a kind soul. She never approached topics with any kind of ego. Just a joy and love for the things she'd worked on and the people she'd worked with
I didn't know her but reading the eulogies it was obvious she was a kind person who touched so many people. I hope some day my eulogies will be similar (if lower in scope).
Rest in peace, Burger Becky! I really enjoyed her interview with CoRecursive a few years ago about porting DOOM to the 3DO[1] and highly recommend a listen.
Admittedly I didn't dive much into this to get the full context, but it's saddening to me that a legendary game designer had a GoFundMe. I was hoping achieving that level of status in a traditionally well-paid industry would leave one well off, financially.
It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still end up shuttering and being no better off than your average joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way. 200k isn't mindblowing for a software engineer, but it's well beyond "average joe" range at that point.
I'm that cog. Or at least, was. Situations like this make me thing a lot about the state of the industry and where I lie in life.
Yep, unfortunately that's a big part of the reason I left for a more traditional tech role. The same skills are extremely valuable at any company writing performance critical software.
I'm wondering if she actually got the fundraiser money, considering how quickly this moved - the last update implied it would have to go to her funeral, and I hope it pays for the bills or helps her family.
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.
I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”
Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.
For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.
Population size is usually included in those calculations. It’s typically GDP per capita.
But I couldn’t agree more that the inequality and social safety net (or lack thereof) make the numbers deeply disconnected from QoL. Which I believe is the whole point.
Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.
actually a difference is also how many players along the supply chain siphon money out of the process. the more greed is allowed and acted on for the treatment, the more expensive it gets. introduce layers of insurances, hedgefonds, pension funds, lobbyism, ... it adds up to riddiculous amounts far beyond the original R&D/infrastructure/treatment costs.
And also downsides, e.g. many treatments just aren't available, and many others would never have had their discovery funded without the market-based system existing.
It's a lot more expensive in the US. Three years of ribociclib is US$100k here in Argentina, which dwarfs the usual costs of things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgical resection. (All of which is normally paid for either by a health plan or by the public hospital system.) In the US, if you have to go through all of that, I think the cost is going to be at least an order of magnitude higher.
Very sad news. This one hit pretty hard for me as not only was she so awesome and contributed so much to so many great games, but the short timeline between "oh dang I have cancer and we're fighting it" to, well, today... was just way too short :(
You are not alone being hit hard by the pace of the cancer's progression. Dr Makis talks about his shocks lately as an oncologist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIYQCjB_NU
You are not alone. I can only think that her post about being very vulnerable after chemo from immune system supression made me realize how lucky you have to be to beat cancer with chemo.
Rebecca was not only an amazing programmer, but a true hacker from the get go. From what I understand she managed to achieve what she did without even a high school diploma -- a real natural talent.
I first really learned of her from the ANTIC podcast [1] in 2015 and was just kind of blown away by this cool, intelligent, creative and humble human being.
I'm personally sad she's gone, but also really...proud? to see how she went out, with tons of witty communications to her friends and associates in her recognizable voice.
To have such a positive impact in the world is something worth achieving.
You're welcome. I think hearing her talk about her life and experiences in her own way is incredibly rewarding. The ANTIC podcast has done a great job of preservation of people involved in early computing and it deserves a lot of support.
What a true legend. The amount of people she has touched with her work is enormous.
Feeling a bit of regret. I feel like I made a poor first impression on Rebecca when I first met her a few years back at VCF East. I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event. I didn't know about the cancer. Thought I would have another chance. This is happening more and more in my life. :/
Let us cherish all the great moments that she helped bring to us.
Just began using a CPAP last week. My first attempts were to try and use a nose clip, sleep wedge, and other tools to no avail. Following a take home test I discovered my apnea was severe. I have now started with a CPAP machine. Results are promising.
As a retro-enthusiast, I was captivated by the stories she shared in her interviews,
particularly about working on the cancelled Half Life port to Classic Mac OS (supposedly it even ran on 68k Macintoshes, How amazing is that !?).
She said that she still had a CD of the gold master on her shelf.
I really fear that work may never see the light of day now...
Aww I’m very sad to hear this. She was close friends to a partner of mine and I met her about ten years ago through that connection. She seemed to be a lovely person.
I saw her last few talks at VCFeast. Always extremely engaging to hear from someone with as much skill and knowledge as her. Amazing to hear how she built her own debugger for the (i believe, i have the memory of a goldfish) Atari 2600. I always tried to catch her talks if possible, if just to get a glimpse of what the past looked like. I'm going to miss having those to look forward to.
Wow. What an impactful person. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I did know about her till her death though I've played many of the games mentioned in the WP article about her. RIP.
Very sad news.
Always appreciate her work on the 3DO Doom. Although the worst port it certainly was no fault of Rebecca. Always enjoyed reading her stories and respected her skill level as a programmer.
Offtopic: several of the embedded Bluesky posts at the end of the article show "The author of the quoted post has requested their posts not be displayed on external sites." Seems not to phase the PC Gamer "journalists".
[0] is a good article about this; not least that this has been happening since at least 1889 (to the point where I'd say we could now probably consider it a valid alternate spelling.)
These are quote-posts; the quote-post isn't protected but the quoted-post is. Bad choice by whoever wrote the article (in fairness the default Bluesky interface doesn't make this particularly clear), but nothing is being displayed that shouldn't be displayed.
Please no. It would be impossible to decide the cutoff for who deserves it. Loud communities would bring drama when their favourite person doesn't get pinned. A black strip might be fine, though.
Im inclined to blame the US healthcare system. It looks like a gofundme was setup to pay for her cancer treatment. A sensible system a) wouldn’t need patients to pay for treatment and b) might have caught it earlier through regular screening
Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Without such evidence your post reads more like propagandizing a death for political purposes than an honest argument.
> Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Do you have any evidence that it wasn't?
I honestly don't know if earlier detection was possible, or would have helped her out or not. What I can tell you is that given the state of health care in this country, you can bet that my default assumption would be "yes" until proven otherwise.
Starting with the assumption of "no" gives our system more slack than it deserves.
Most types of cancers are not routinely screened for. The post says that the cancer was in her liver and lungs, and neither liver cancer nor lung cancer are routinely screened for (lung cancer screenings are recommended for people with a history of heavy smoking).
> What I can tell you is that given the state of health care in this country, you can bet that my default assumption would be "yes" until proven otherwise.
This is clearly a politically-motivated point rather than one grounded in science or reality. Cancer screening in the US is generally more aggressive, not less aggressive, than in other developed countries. For example, the US has historically recommended annual mammograms starting at age 40, while Europe doesn't start until age 50 and only does them every two years. US guidelines are to start screening for colon cancer at age 45 (c.f. 50 in most of Europe), and the US uses a much more invasive (and costlier) approach to colon cancer screening on top of the age gap.
If anything the US probably overinvests in cancer screening. The evidence in favor of starting mammograms at 40 is extremely dubious, as is the evidence for invasive and expensive colonoscopies (standard US practice) over fecal matter tests (standard European practice) for colon cancer screening.
> The post says that the cancer was in her liver and lungs, and neither liver cancer nor lung cancer are routinely screened for ...
If you have got cancer in your liver and lung then those are probably metastases, and most often the original cancer is in the colon.
> the evidence for invasive and expensive colonoscopies (standard US practice) over fecal matter tests (standard European practice) for colon cancer screening [is extremely dubious].
Fecal matter tests will tell if you have got a tumour and that tumour is bleeding. But not all colon tumours bleed.
Colon cancer can be a silent killer, that often goes without symptoms for years until it has metastasised and become terminal.
A colonoscopy will tell if you if you have got a polyp — an early pre-stage of cancer. And a polyp can be removed right then and there during the procedure with a tiny wire-loop or claw at the end of the instrument — and then you're safe.
I recommend everyone who is 45 y/o or older to get a colonoscopy every ten years. That is how long a polyp takes to develop into a tumour .. for normal people.
Myself, I have Lynch syndrome, so I have had to start earlier and get a colonoscopy every year. I had my fourteenth two days ago.
A COLONOSCOPY IS NO BIG DEAL. It is not invasive, it is not sexual, it is not demeaning. Everyone is professional, interested in your intestine, not your butt. It does usually not hurt, and if it does it is because of gas, as there are no other types of sensory nerves in the colon. If you are otherwise healthy, it is not dangerous. You can get it done it medicated, or even sedated if you want. I usually do it without any such drugs. The worst part is not the procedure but the prep — because laxatives taste bad. But if you are healthy and ask for it, a doctor could give you a stronger laxative that you don't have to drink as much of.
Colonoscopies, involving inserting instruments into the body, are definitely an invasive medical procedure.
> An invasive procedure is one where purposeful/deliberate access to the body is gained via an incision, percutaneous puncture, where instrumentation is used in addition to the puncture needle, or instrumentation via a natural orifice. It begins when entry to the body is gained and ends when the instrument is removed, and/or the skin is closed. Invasive procedures are performed by trained healthcare professionals using instruments, which include, but are not limited to, endoscopes, catheters, scalpels, scissors, devices and tubes.
[1], emphasis added.
> A medical procedure that invades (enters) the body, usually by cutting or puncturing the skin or by inserting instruments into the body.
[2], emphasis added
> An invasive procedure is one in which the body is "invaded", or entered by a needle, tube, device, or scope.
[3], emphasis added
Is it a big deal? Maybe not to you, maybe to other people. Is it better than a much cheaper (and not invasive) FOBT? Questionable.
NordICC [4] found an 18% reduction in colon cancer incidence after 10 years with a colonoscopy screening program, but no statistically significant reduction in mortality (either colon cancer or all-cause). Hardcastle et al. [5] found no reduction in colon cancer incidence but a 15% reduction in colon cancer mortality after 7.8 years with a FOBT screening program.
Everyone's gungho about evidence-based medicine until the evidence fails to support their preferred procedures.
Looking at corporate profit levels versus wage levels over the past twenty years, the U.S. as a capitalist country can afford a great deal more of healthcare inflation in order to raise the quality of life for its population.
Should its businesses afford that out of their profits?
Since households can’t afford eggs, much less health care costs, at the wages paid by businesses; so this decision is up to firms rather than households to decide. Founders, your input would especially be appreciated here.
Even if inappropriate, this reads like a normal expression of grief to me.
It's normal to be upset about the circumstances under which someone died, and to be angry if you believe it was avoidable. Under the five stages model, this would be bargaining and anger.
> I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do
I can't even imagine the level of skill required to just say, "Fine, I'll write MY OWN string lib!" while chasing a deadline.
As an aside...I wonder what will happen to her personal artifacts. There was a media blitz awhile back when Tim Cain said he doesn't have the original source code to Fallout because he was "ordered to destroy it" by Interplay when he left. But Becky then chimed in to say that she did have a surviving copy, because she was a founder. [0] I hope someone else on her behalf would be able to continue that effort, but I worry that with her death, Bethesda would assert that no one else has "legal standing" to do so.
[0] https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/fallout-1-2-source-cod...