Bernie Stolar, Sega and PlayStation executive, dies at 75

The previous president of Sega of America who oversaw the 1999 launch of the Dreamcast has died. Bernie Stolar, 75, was additionally a founding government of Sony Laptop Leisure America, which launched the PlayStation and a number of other first-party video games for it in 1995.

Stolar’s work for SCEA (at present Sony Interactive Leisure) helped set up many franchises that proceed at present, together with Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, and Ridge Racer. For Sega, Stolar acquired Visible Ideas and ushered within the 2K Sports activities label (each had been later bought to Take-Two Interactive) with the NFL 2K and NBA 2K sequence.

Each had been cornerstone launches for the Dreamcast in 1999, the place Stolar is credited with orienting the corporate’s focus towards the brand new console and away from the flagging Sega Saturn, which had quickly misplaced market share within the U.S. to the brand new PlayStation. Dreamcast, regardless of a strong efficiency within the U.S. and a fanbase that also reveres it, was shortly discontinued in 2001 after dropping to the PlayStation 2 in each different worldwide market.

Stolar joined Sega of America (SOA) in 1997 and later took over from Tom Kalinske, the SOA president who oversaw the rise of the Sega Genesis and the corporate’s head-to-head successes towards Nintendo within the early Nineties. Stolar had been employed as a {hardware} marketing consultant by Sega’s Hayao Nakayama, with whom Kalinske had often clashed earlier than resigning. However when Nakayama was ousted by Sega’s board, Stolar was not far behind him.

“I took the Sega place based mostly on conversations with Hayao Nakayama, who was then chairman of the corporate,” Stolar mentioned, in response to a tribute printed Saturday by VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi. “We’d institute and herald a brand new {hardware} system that may do on-line multiplayer video games. That grew to become Dreamcast. I headed that up. Sadly Nakayama acquired pushed out of the corporate by [Isao] Okawa on the finish of 1999, and when he acquired pushed out, I acquired into an argument with Japan as effectively.”

Stolar continued to work in quite a lot of leisure software program ventures for the following 17 years, together with at Google, which had purchased an organization the place he was an adviser and board member. To Takahashi, Stolar recalled making an attempt to get Google into the video games enterprise by “taking video games from publishers and streaming these by our on-line community.”

Google chief government Eric Schmidt wouldn’t do it, Stolar mentioned. “That’s after I knew I ought to go away the corporate.” Fourteen years later, Google launched Stadia, a cloud gaming service wherein main publishers’ video games are streamed to customers over Google’s Chrome internet browser.

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