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).
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
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.
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.
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 :(
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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".
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.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] threadhttps://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index...
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
We lost a legend.
It was a masterful blend of RPG, dungeon crawl, and puzzles and had a memorable soundtrack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru5kg35dNso
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
BT3 is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_The_Bards_Tale_3_-_Thief_O...
https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=188&letter=B
... which is available for many platforms, including Windows and Linux:
https://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1
although the latest version of DosBox seems to be from 2019, so maybe others can suggest a more actively-maintained emulator.
If you purchase Bards Tale 4 you get the remastered 1,2, and 3 for free.
I have played BT 1 every year or so since the late 80s.
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.
https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/
Rest in piece, you absolute legend.
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.
She was probably the first programmer I knew by name as a kid, following the games industry as a kid.
I played BT1, BT2, and BT3 for hours and hours.
https://www.burgerbecky.com/becky.htm
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Score_(TV_series)
“We have gone on so many adventures together! But, into the great unknown! I go first!!!“
Such a legend. RIP.
[1]: https://corecursive.com/doomed-to-fail-with-burger-becky/
Am I crazy or does that sentence have, I don't know how to explain it, the 'rhythm' of a joke? Feels like accidental rhyming, a mark of bad writing?
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.