RIP Bernie Stolar, Who Helped Launch Both The PlayStation And Dreamcast
Stolar pictured throughout the Dreamcast’s launchPhoto: Associated Press (AP)
Bernie Stolar, probably the most essential online game executives of the Nineteen Nineties, has handed away on the age of 75, GamesBeat reviews.
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Stolar started working within the online game enterprise in 1980, first founding a coin-op firm earlier than shifting to Atari. There he did the whole lot from engaged on their arcade video games, to their later house console efforts, to of all issues, main improvement on the Lynx, Atari’s infamously huge handheld machine.
He then moved to Sony the place he helped discovered the American division of the corporate’s PlayStation model, serving as the corporate’s first government vp. While at Sony his greatest achievement was lining up various studios and properties for the PlayStation’s early library of video games—forming relationships that in lots of instances endure in 2022—together with Ridge Racer, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro.
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After the PlayStation’s launch, Stolar moved to rivals Sega, the place he didn’t fiddle. As GamesBeat remembers:
“When I got to Sega I immediately said, ‘We have to kill Saturn. We have to stop Saturn and start building the new technology.’ That’s what I did. I brought in a new team of people and cleaned house. There were 300-some-odd employees and I took the company down to 90 employees to start rebuilding,” Stolar stated.
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While with Sega, Stolar made one other visionary long-term signing, shopping for a studio known as Visual Concepts who would go on to turn into 2K Sports, and who proceed to launch the NBA 2K sequence to this present day.
Stolar’s post-90s profession was marked by spells at Mattel (the place he pushed the corporate to double down on the manufacturing of Barbie video video games) and Google, the place he served as the corporate’s first ever “Games Evangelist,” a place he tried to make use of to champion the concept of a streaming recreation service, one thing the corporate waved off on the time after which…would revisit a decade later, lengthy after Stolar had left, earlier than fully screwing it up.