Well, I’ve not done one of these for a while, a remembrance for someone who has passed away. Recently, Rebecca (Burger Becky) Heineman lost her battle with cancer. If you don’t know who Rebecca was, then I’m just going to give you a few brief career highlights. Rebecca’s love for gaming began at an early age… and quite illegally too. She used to pirate cartridges for the Atari 2600. She spent some time learning how to reverse engineer the 2600 and studied how the games were made. In 1980 she took part in a Space Invaders championship in L.A. and won. Then she took part in another championship in New York and won that too.

Rebecca then landed a job writing for Electronic Games. She met with the owners of game publisher, Avalon Hill, mentioned how she had reverse engineered the Atari 2600, and she was only 16 at the time. Rebecca started working at Avalon Hill where she began to code games. As the next generation of gaming dawned, Rebecca began to learn how to code on the Commodore 64, Apple II, VIC-20, and IBM PC. Eventually, Rebecca joined Brian Fargo, Jay Patel and Troy Worrell and co-founded Interplay Productions. Interplay were behind some of the biggest games of the 80s an 90s. But, at first, money was tight and to survive, she would store and eat burgers in her desk, and she soon earned the nickname “Burger Becky”.

Long story short and after either coding or porting many, many games, she was asked to port the massive fan favourite, Doom to the 3DO console. And this, dear reader, is where the main meat of this remembrance article begins…

The 3DO was a powerful machine back then and was more than capable of having a port of Doom that could rival and even beat some of the better ones on the market. Potentially, 3DO Doom could’ve been amazing. And yet, it was atrocious, easily the worst port of the game at the time. When just looking from the outside in, it is very easy to blame things like poor and lazy programmers for putting out a shoddy product. So then, 3DO Doom was utter shit as the person handling the port just did not care, right? Well, no. The story of the making of 3DO Doom is full of stubborn, clueless management and a coder who was shafted and forced into making a crap port.

The best place to start with this story is with Randy Scott, the CEO and founder of publisher Art Data Interactive, who would publish 3DO Doom, and I need to look at a quote regarding 3DO Doom that Randy gave during an interview.

Randy Scott: “There will be higher resolution graphics and full-spectrum audio in our fast and furious 3DO version of Doom. Doom II will include some extensive enhancements, new levels and special surprises.”

It was going to have FMV sequences too See, Randy was hyping up Doom on the 3DO for quite some time, over hyping in fact. He was appearing in gaming magazines and such talking about how great that the 3DO version of Doom was going to be, how it would be the best Doom ever and even surpassing the PC original. Randy really had a lot of belief in this 3DO port. Funnily enough, id Software’s very own John Carmack originally didn’t even want Doom on the 3DO. He made that very clear in a rather lengthy post from the (now defunct) Atari Explorer Online site from the 22^nd of January 1994. I’ve had to trim down his very lengthy post but this is what John had to say about Doom on the 3DO in 1994. He even gave permission to quote it (though I have slightly edited for this article).

John Carmack: “Feel free to quote this. We have a few reasons for not developing on the 3DO, but development machine bigotry isn’t one of them. I used an Apple IIGS for SNES development (I am never, EVER, going to work with Nintendo again), and I am suffering with an Atari Falcon for Jaguar work until I can port the tools to NEXTSTEP. I wouldn’t turn away a Mac based environment.
The biggest reason is that I doubt that 3DO is going to become a huge success. $750 is way out of line for a pure entertainment machine. Was the NEO-GEO a success two years ago? We bought one, but we don’t know anyone else that did. I doubt there will be all that many units sold.
To make matters worse, there are over one hundred third party licensees supposedly developing on 3DO. If there were only a couple companies developing for it, they might make money. I predict there is going to be some serious lossage going on in the 3DO developer community.”

Well, John Carmack wasn’t wrong there, was he? The 3DO was a massive flop in the end and yes, there was some serious “lossage” as John put it. He also ended his very lengthy post by pointing out why he favoured the Atari Jaguar over the 3DO.

John Carmack: “Why the Jag is cooler than the 3DO (from my point of view):  It only costs $250. The bulk of its processing power is user programmable. The 3DO has a capable main processor (a couple times better than the weak 68k in the Jag), but most of its power is in custom hardware that has narrow functionality for affine transformations. The Jag has some stupid hardware for z buffering and Gouraud shading, but I can just ignore it and tell the two 27mhz RISC chips to do EXACTLY what I want. A 64 bit bus with multiple independent processors may not be the easiest thing to optimize for, but there is a LOT of potential.
There will probably be a version of Doom for 3DO. We are talking with a few companies about licensing out the port. It would be kind of fun to do it here, but I am eager to get to work on the next generation game engine that will make Doom look puny…”

So then, while John Carmack was very much against working on a Doom port for the 3DO himself, or even at id Software at all, he was open to the idea of someone else having a go at it. Yes, this is where Randy Scott of publisher, Art Data Interactive comes in. Do you want to know the kind of person that Randy Scott is? He is a liar, a conman and in 2017, he faced charges of child sex abuse after becoming a music teacher to children. As NBC covered.

NBC: “Randal “Randy” Letcher Scott, 57, of Irvine, is charged with two felony counts of committing lewd acts on a child younger than 14, according to Deputy District Attorney Bobby Taghavi.
Scott owns the Music Town business. Given his access to children, investigators are concerned there may be more alleged victims, Taghavi said.
Scott is accused of molesting the 5-year-old girl, who was his student, sometime between October and December 2015, Taghavi said. He allegedly molested the 6-year-old, who was also a student, sometime in November of last year, the prosecutor said.”

Randy Scott eventually pleaded guilty, which you can read up on right here. The story goes on and on but I don’t want to dwell on that. The point is that Randy Scott is not nice people. Anyway, Randy, as the CEO of Art Data Interactive approached id Software and asked if he could have the license to bring Doom to the 3DO. As already covered, id (and particularity John Carmack) had no real interest in seeing Doom on the 3DO, so they put a rather high price in place for the license, in the hope that it would put Randy off and he would just go away. It has been said that id Software asked for around $250,000 to license Doom on the 3DO. That’s a hell of a lot of money now, never mind on the early ‘90s. Anyone with any sense would’ve said “no thanks” and left it at that. Not Randy Scott.

According to Rebecca Heineman (who will be dominating this story soon enough), Randy Scott knew nothing about the video game industry and he had “persuaded” members of a church to give him the capital (around $100,000) to start his publishing firm, Art Data Interactive. So, he didn’t even have his own money to pay for the Doom rights. How Randy Scott raised that $250,000 for the Doom license from id Software is not exactly known, but Randy was said to be a very “charming” and “persuasive guy”, possibly to the point where he could groom and sexually abuse children? So, it is believed that Randy Scott just raised the funds by asking people he knew to donate to his cause. Anyway, he got the money and the Doom license for the 3DO.

After which, Randy Scott began the hype train (around December of 1994) for the best Doom ever on the 3DO, magazine interviews and all that. Only, he didn’t even have a programmer in place to handle the port. Randy was boasting about Doom on the 3DO and all he had was a license and no game… yet. Magazines even began to feature pictures of Doom on the 3DO, even though it didn’t exist. How? Well, it turns out that Randy would send the magazines pictures of the PC version and claimed that they were from the 3DO port when the truth was that there was no 3DO Doom at the time. More bullshittery.

After a few months of the port supposedly being worked on (it wasn’t), the head honchos at the 3DO Company itself wanted to see the game. A few (PC) screenshots in magazines and Randy Scott’s hype could only go so far. See, the 3DO was not selling well and having, not only Doom on their machine, but the best version of Doom, complete with all new and exclusive maps and weapons, etc that Randy claimed it would have, was a major attraction and could boost sales of the struggling console. So yeah, the bigwigs at the 3DO Company were quite eager to see their amazing version of one of the biggest, if not the biggest game at the time. Randy Scott would do what he did best and fob people off with his spiel. According to Randy, Doom was coming to the 3DO and it was going to be awesome, it just needs more time before it can be shown.

3DO Magazine UK had a multipage feature on Art Data Interactive, published in April 1995. Of course Randy Scott as the CEO was front and centre and yes, the Doom on 3DO hype continued.

Randy Scott: “We’re now starting to see the first playable stages of 3DO Doom and there is, simply, no comparison between the PC and 3DO versions. Oh yeah. The stuff that we’re putting together is just going to be phenomenal. I tell everybody load up your rocket launchers and break out the sun tan oil because this is the hottest version of Doom that you’re ever going to see.”

Hey wait, there is an actual version of Doom on the 3DO? Perhaps all of the bullshit and palming off magazines with PC screenshots was just subterfuge to keep people off the trail that this version of Doom would be so damn awesome. Again, this was from around April of 1995 and 3DO Doom was set to be released ate December 1995. So then, things were moving forwards and in a few months, the best version of Doom would exist… right?

It was the summer of 1995, around August, when Randy Scott approached Rebecca Heineman to help get 3DO Doom “finished”. At the time Rebecca had earned her stripes as one of the most respected and trustworthy programmers in the business. She even handled the 3DO port of Wolfenstein 3D and do you know what? It’s fucking awesome and one of the best, maybe the best port of the classic FPS on any console. This meant that Rebecca already had an in with id Software, she had previously handled the port of one of their FPS games to the 3DO and quite obviously knew her stuff. According to Randy Scott, the 3DO version of Doom was around 90% complete. All he wanted Rebecca Heineman to do was come on board and help with that last 10%, add the spit on polish needed to make it the best Doom ever.

Again, this was around August of 1995, with 3DO Doom to be released late December of the same year. Rebecca Heineman knew that she had to get the game finished by October, at the latest, so that it could go through QA, okayed by the publisher and the 3DO Company, etc to eventually be mass produced and on shop shelves on time for the release date in December. For a programmer as experienced and knowledgeable as Rebecca, this was money for old rope and one of the easiest jobs ever, especially as it was just to be a quick tidy up job with 90% of the game already done. So yeah, Rebecca agreed. It took a few weeks for the contract to be drawn up and signed but Rebecca Heineman was ready and willing to finish this 90% done 3DO port of Doom.

Pretty much even before the ink had dried on the signed contract, Rebecca Heineman asked Art Data Interactive (as the publisher) for the source code of the 3DO version of Doom that they had, so that she could get working on it and add the needed polish. She got nothing, and was told to just “start working on the game”. See, the thing is that a programmer can’t really begin “working on the game” without the source code. So, Randy Scott of Art Data Interactive sent Rebecca a copy of Doom on the PC. Right about now, alarm bells should be ringing. What good is a copy of the PC version of Doom when Rebecca has been asked to finish the 90% completed 3DO version… especially as she already owned a copy of the PC version of Doom anyway? Randy Scott may as well as just sent Rebecca an empty package, because that would’ve been just as useful as a copy of Doom on the PC. A week went by with Rebecca talking to Randy several times explaining that she needs the source code to do anything. After which, Tristan Anderson (who worked at Art Data Interactive and was friends with Rebecca Heineman) told her that there is no source code to send to her, it didn’t exist.

It was now about 10 weeks until the game had to be finalised and Rebecca Heineman, with a signed contract to deliver Doom on the 3DO, has just learned that there is no Doom on the 3DO. What was supposed to be a fairly simple clean up the code and add some polish job, was now a full on port job. A port job like this would take the better part of a year or more to do properly, Rebecca had just 10 weeks. Panicking, Rebecca called some friends at the 3DO Company and explained that it could not be done and they said to just finish the version of the game that Randy Scott had been hyping up, the version that had screenshots in the magazines and such. It was Rebecca who had to tell the 3DO Company that the game doesn’t exist. Shit and a fan had already collided. Still, Rebecca was sure that she could do something.

The first thing was to get some much needed help from id Software. Due to Rebecca Heineman porting Wolfenstein 3D to the 3DO (and doing it very well), she was already on good terms with the id crew. After a call to John Carmack, Rebecca received two CDs in the post. One CD was the source code for the PC version of Doom, a massive help but would still leave Rebecca with several months of work to do and she only had 10 weeks. On the second CD was the source code for the Atari Jaguar port of Doom that John Carmack himself had handled. Now, this one was a godsend because the Jaguar version had already been “simplified” for consoles and Rebecca could begin to program a 3DO version using the Jaguar port as a springboard.

There was a slight hurdle to get over. All of that hype that Randy Scott had being dishing out the last few months. Rebecca Heineman wanted to, at least, try to get some new content into the 3DO version of Doom, as promised. Rebecca drove to Art Data Interactive’s HQ in Simi Valley, California from Covina, California (where Heineman was based at the time) around 65 miles away. She really didn’t have the spare time to waste travelling when she had to port Doom to the 3DO in 10 weeks. Still, Rebecca wanted to see exactly what work (if any) Randy Scott and Art Data Interactive had done on this new and improved version of Doom. Because at this point, she needed any and all help that she could get.

Believe it or not, Randy Scott did actually have some kind of new content for Doom on the 3DO. He had several JPEGS of new maps and weapons. No actual programming, no code or anything like that, just some JPEGS. Basic drawings that Randy had done of what he wanted to have in the 3DO port of Doom. See, Randy thought that that was how programming worked, that you could just draw a picture of a gun, press a button and (as if by magic) it would be in the game and fully functional. This was the moment when Rebecca Heineman realised that Randy Scott was utterly fucking clueless about any and everything related to game programming. He had bullshitted his was into the industry by conning a church to give him money to start Art Data Interactive, and had bullshitted the press, the 3DO Company, id Software, and everyone else with Doom on the 3DO.

The reason that Randy Scott had sent Rebecca Heineman a copy of Doom on the PC, when she asked for the source code for the 3DO version, was because he thought that all Rebecca had to so was copy the game from the PC onto the 3DO. If porting a game was that easy, we’d all be doing it. Now, having just wasted valuable time driving to Art Data Interactive’s HQ, Rebecca headed back to her office and called the 3DO Company to tell them that the project was dead, there would be no Doom on the 3DO. Rightfully so too, why should she put up with all this crap and all the lies from Randy Scott? Rebecca Heineman did say that she could do a port, but would need at least a year to do it right. The 3DO Company begged for Rebecca for something, anything and to deliver a “shippable” version of Doom on the 3DO for the coming December release. Now, “shippable” doesn’t necessarily mean playable, it just means something that can be put on shop shelves. Randy Scott had been spending months hyping up Doom on the 3DO, improved graphics, new and exclusive levels and weapons, and The 3DO Company had been getting loads of great press that Doom was coming to their console. They had to have some kind of Doom on the shop shelves for the release date. Obviously not Randy’s over-hyped “best Doom ever”, but just a version of Doom, any version of Doom. Rebecca agreed, she didn’t want to let her friends down at the 3DO Company as they were already struggling. She would try to get some kind of version of Doom ported over to the 3DO… in just 10 weeks.

Using that Atari Jaguar source code, Rebecca Heineman got it running on the 3DO. It was a hack job but she got it working and in the 10 week time frame. Given more time, it could’ve been a far better port. The 3DO had more memory than the Jaguar and was (overall) a more powerful console. So, it could’ve run a better version, Rebecca just didn’t have the time to optimise it. Given a year or so of development, the 3DO version quite possibly could’ve been “the best Doom ever” that Randy Scott was hyping, with permission form id Software, it could’ve had new levels and weapons. The 3DO port had the potential of being the best version of Doom on consoles at the time, especially with Rebecca Heineman heading it up. If only she had been brought in from the start and not 10 weeks from the deadline.

When shipped, 3DO Doom had four selectable screen sizes. The smallest made the game somewhat playable with a half-decent frame rate. The biggest was still no where near full screen and slowed the game down to a frame rate worse than the SNES port. But, there were two other and bigger screen sizes that would be used on the updated 3DO, the Panasonic M2. This was going to be a more powerful console and could run games faster, so the bigger screens of Doom would work so much better. The Panasonic M2 was never released as the 3DO was such a flop. So, those bigger screens for Doom were never used. But, if you knew the cheat codes, you could unlock those bigger screens on the 3DO. When running Doom on the biggest screen (which was still not exactly full screen, by the way) Doom’s frame rate drops to sub 5fps. Just to finish this story and according to an interview that Rebecca Heineman did with nodontdie.com in 2015.

Rebecca Heineman: “Randy at Art Data did the stupidest thing, even more stupider than everything up to this point. He pressed 250,000 copies, as I understand it, of Doom for the 3DO.
To put it in perspective, there were only 250,000 3DOs in existence. It was a blunder of the same proportions of ET, where Atari printed out as much cartridges as there were consoles. Which is, mathematically, you’re never gonna sell them all.”

It has been reported that 3DO Doom only sold 10,000 units. Bearing in mind that Randy Scoot paid id Software $250,000 for the Doom license, then had to pay for all of the copies of the game to be printed, had to pay Rebecca Heineman for her work and so on. To then only sell 10,000 copies, that’s not making any profit. Unsurprisingly, Art Data Interactive went bust a few months following this calamity.

So yeah, 3DO Doom was not a terrible port due to a lazy programmer. Rebecca Heineman wanted the game to be great, much like her Wolfenstein 3D port. 3DO Doom was terrible because a conman, turned paedophile, lied his way into the industry, stole money from folks and fooled Rebecca into signing a contract to port a game in an impossible timeframe.

Rebecca Heineman passed away on the 17th of November, 2025, aged 62. Her body of work in the industry is amazing, she co-founded Interplay, who would go on to create Fallout in 1997. Just one of the many, many titles released. A true legend and pioneer in gaming who will be missed.