PlayStation, Dreamcast Creator Bernie Stolar Passes Away
The person behind the PlayStation and Dreamcast, Bernie Stolar, recently passed away from undisclosed causes. The news comes from friends of the games industry legend. Stolar was aged 75.
Stolar served as the President and Chief Operating Officer at Sega of America during which time he oversaw the development of the Dreamcast. Prior to his time at Sega of America, Stolar was the Executive Vice President at Sony Computer Entertainment, a position which saw him launching franchises including Crash Bandicoot, Ridge Racer, Oddworld, and Spyro.
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“I loved working for Sony,” Stolar told GameBeat during an interview back in 2015. “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.” The executive added that “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.”
Stolar would eventually ship the Dreamcast, a console which sold more than nine million units in total. The executive went on to manage the acquisition of Visual Concepts, founding 2K Sports. The company still produces NBA 2K and other sports games.
The games industry legend went over to Adscape Media in 2015 before the company was purchased by Google. “There was no interest in games at Google at the time,” Stolar pointed out. “I went to the Chief Executive Officer, who was Eric Schmidt, and said, ‘why don’t we put advertising in all these games and give them away for free online?’ He said ‘we’re not in the game business.’ I said ‘we’re not going into the game business. We’re not developing games. We’re taking games
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