Bernie Stolar, officer that introduced PlayStation and also Dreamcast, passes away at 75

28.06.2022

The previous head of state of Sega of America that supervised the 1999 launch of the Dreamcast has actually passed away. Bernie Stolar, 75, was likewise a founding exec of Sony Computer Entertainment America, which introduced the PlayStation and also a number of first-party games for it in 1995.

Stolar’s benefit SCEA (today Sony Interactive Entertainment) assisted develop numerous franchise business that proceed today, consisting of Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, and alsoRidge Racer For Sega, Stolar gotten Visual Concepts and also introduced the 2K Sports tag (both were later on marketed to Take-Two Interactive) with the NFL 2K and also NBA 2K collection.

Both were keystone launches for the Dreamcast in 1999, where Stolar is attributed with orienting the business’s emphasis towards the brand-new console and also far from the flagging Sega Saturn, which had actually quickly shed market share in the U.S. to the brand-new PlayStation. Dreamcast, regardless of a strong efficiency in the U.S. and also a fanbase that still respects it, was promptly ceased in 2001 after shedding to the PlayStation 2 in every various other worldwide market.

Stolar signed up with Sega of America (SOA) in 1997 and also later on replaced Tom Kalinske, the SOA head of state that oversaw the rise of the Sega Genesis and also the business’s neck and neck successes versus Nintendo in the very early 1990s. Stolar had actually been worked with as an equipment specialist by Sega’s Hayao Nakayama, with whom Kalinske had actually regularly clashed prior to surrendering. But when Nakayama was ousted by Sega’s board, Stolar was stone’s throw behind him.

“I took the Sega position based on conversations with Hayao Nakayama, who was then chairman of the company,” Stolar stated, according to a tribute published Saturday by VentureBeat’sDean Takahashi “We’d institute and bring in a new hardware system that would do online multiplayer games. That became Dreamcast. I headed that up. Unfortunately Nakayama got pushed out of the company by [Isao] Okawa at the end of 1999, and when he got pushed out, I got into an argument with Japan as well.”

Stolar remained to operate in a range of enjoyment software application endeavors for the following 17 years, consisting of at Google, which had actually purchased a business where he was an advisor and also board participant. To Takahashi, Stolar remembered attempting to obtain Google right into the games service by “taking games from publishers and streaming those through our online network.”

Google president Eric Schmidt would not do it, Stolar stated. “That’s when I knew I should leave the company.” Fourteen years later on, Google introduced Stadia, a cloud pc gaming solution in which significant authors’ games are streamed to customers over Google’s Chrome internet internet browser.

Source: Polygon