Rebecca Heineman, a trailblazing transgender video game developer who fled a miserable home life as a teenager, taught herself to code and was crowned the first champion of a large-scale national video game tournament in the United States before becoming a respected programmer and entrepreneur, died on Nov. 17 in Rockwall, Texas. She was 62.

Her son, William, said her death, in a hospital, was from adenocarcinoma, a type of cancer that begins in the glands that line organs.

Ms. Heineman, who taught herself to program at the dawn of the home video game era, in the 1970s, made her name as a founder of a number of game studios, including Interplay Productions (now Interplay Entertainment), Logicware and Contraband Entertainment. She was known as well for her innovative work on the development of the popular game Doom for 3DO, a type of console introduced in the 1990s.

In 1983, while still working under her birth name, she joined the noted game developer Brian Fargo, along with Jay Patel and Troy Worrell, to start Interplay.

Among the projects she developed or helped develop were the popular fantasy role-playing games Dragon Wars, released in 1989 for computers like the Commodore 64 and Apple II, and The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate, a title that was released a year earlier. It was included in the exhibition “The Art of Video Games” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington in 2012.

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