Bernie Stolar, one of the vital online game executives of the Nineteen Nineties, has handed away on the age of 75, GamesBeat experiences.
Stolar started working within the online game enterprise in 1980, first founding a coin-op firm earlier than transferring to Atari, the place he did every part from engaged on their arcade video games to their later house console efforts to, of all issues, main growth on the Lynx, Atari’s infamously monumental handheld gadget.
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 govt vice chairman. Whereas at Sony his greatest achievement was lining up a variety of 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.
After the PlayStation’s launch Stolar moved to rivals Sega, the place he didn’t fiddle. As GamesBeat remembers:
“After I obtained to Sega I instantly mentioned, ‘We now have to kill Saturn. We now have to cease Saturn and begin constructing the brand new know-how.’ That’s what I did. I introduced in a brand new staff of individuals and cleaned home. There have been 300-some-odd workers and I took the corporate right down to 90 workers to begin rebuilding,” Stolar mentioned.
Whereas with Sega Stolar made one other visionary long-term signing, shopping for a studio known as Visible Ideas who would go on to grow to be 2K Sports activities, and who proceed to launch the NBA 2K sequence to at the present time.
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 “Video games Evangelist”, a place he tried to make use of to champion the concept of a streaming sport 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.
