Born in the 1940s, Bernie Stolar first took advantage of the boom in arcade games to found a development company named Pacific Novelty Manufacturing in 1980, which allowed him to be recruited by Atari in the process. Here, Bernie Stolar is transferred from the arcade to consoles and participates in the design of the Lynx, Atari’s portable console released in 1989.
However, it was a few years later that the name Bernie Stolar became familiar to players of the time. And for good reason, the man was one of the founders of Sony Computer Entertainment America, of which he was the vice-president at the time of the launch of the PlayStation. Many emblematic games such as Ridge Racer, Battle Arena Toshinden, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon or even Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey were signed under his direction. Bernie Stolar targeted 3D games capable of showcasing the capabilities of the PlayStation, leaving out RPG enthusiasts who were then most often in 2D and did not achieve strong commercial performances outside of Japan at the time. .
As he explained in an interview with GamesBeat journalist Dean Takahashi, the story between Bernie Stolar and PlayStation could have lasted much longer. However, the Japanese management of Sony had triggered a restructuring led by Shigeo Maruyama (chairman of the board of directors) and Bernie Stolar saw his comrades fall one after the other, starting with Steve Race, the very first president of Sony Computer Entertainment America is remembered for his intervention as short as effective at E3 1995. Bernie Stolar then decides to jump into the camp opposite for fear of being ejected too.
“I loved working for Sony. I absolutely loved it. I wouldn’t have left Sony if I hadn’t also lived in fear of getting fired along with everyone else. What happened next was that I got worried. Everyone was getting fired. I felt like the last survivor. I was offered to become president of Sega of America after the departure of Tom Kalinske“, he says.
He then decided to join the company that he himself had helped to weaken, Sega, and therefore saw the sinking of the Saturn from the inside before participating in the last-ditch operation that was the Dreamcast. If the public may remember Peter Moore best, it was Bernie Stolar who was president of Sega of America during the launch of the Dreamcast. In this position, he is notably recognized for having acquired the Visual Concepts studio and created the 2K Sports label, which will make Take-Two Interactive happy a few years later. Although largely beaten by the PlayStation 2, the Dreamcast will have made an honorable run in the United States and left many more memories for American players than the Saturn.
When I arrived at Sega, I immediately said: We have to kill the Saturn. We have to stop the Saturn and start building the next generation. That’s what I did. I cleaned up and brought in a new team of people. There were about 300 employees and I reduced the company to 90 employees to start rebuilding it.
At Sega, Bernie Stolar repeated the brilliance made by Sony a few years earlier in terms of pricing policy when he announced to acclaim in 1999 that the Dreamcast would be sold for only 199 dollars. And this while the management of Sega Japan had insisted that the machine be sold for 249 dollars. Recruited by Hayao Nakayama, Bernie Stolar was asked to leave Sega in December 1999 when his mentor was pushed out by Isao Okawa, chairman of Sega’s board of directors. Replaced by Peter Moore, whom he himself had recruited from Reebok, Bernie Stolar then joined Mattel, just a few months after the release of the Dreamcast.
Bernie Stolar will remain at Barbie until the end of 2005 before joining the advertising agency Adscape which will be sold to Google for the sum of 23 million dollars. Once an employee of Google, Bernie Stolar then tried to convince the web giant to get into video games, but the end of his career would be made up of a series of start-ups. He died at his home in California in June 2022 at the age of 75. “He was one of the most outspoken and honest – and memorable – executives I’ve met in the gaming industry.“, testifies the veteran journalist Dean Takahashi.
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