Bernie Stolar, the previous president of Sega of America and one of Sony Computer Entertainment America’s founding members, has passed away at 75.
The information was verified by GamesBeat which reported that Stolar’s funeral occurred yesterday (June 26).
The video games business legend began working within the enterprise in 1980 because the co-founder of a coin-op agency. Later, he started working at Atari for the corporate’s arcade and console divisions.
Stolar went on to Sony and have become a founding member of the American division of the PlayStation model. He then acted as the corporate’s first government president and continued to arrange a number of studios for the corporate’s early sport titles.
These embody impartial properties that stay to be broadly widespread to at the present time: Crash Bandicoot, Spyro The Dragon, Oddworld Inhabitants, and Ridge Racer.
As GamesBeat remembers from 2015, Stolar stated: “I loved working for Sony. I really did. But when the opportunity came up to go to Sega and help rebuild the business and come up with new hardware, I was very interested in doing it. I wouldn’t have left Sony if I hadn’t also lived in fear of getting fired along with everyone else, though.”
Stolar later left Sony and joined Sega and finally helped lead the event and launch of the Dreamcast. One of his high strikes on the firm was to amass Visual Concepts for Sega of America and create 2K Sports.
“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 in the identical 2015 interview.
Stolar continued advancing via his profession and went on to hitch Mattel in 1999 the place he offered Barbie video video games. He then moved to Google in 2005 the place he served because the “games evangelist” and he hoped to get the corporate into the gaming business.
After Google, Stolar ran some startups for firms akin to GetFugu, Zoom Platform, the Jordan Freeman Group, and CogniToys. He joked to GamesBeat that “he could be the grandfather for the CEOs he was advising,” and went on to say that he had no plans of stopping.
