It sucks to start the week with sad news and that includes when someone passes away, but unfortunately here we are it has to do with the gaming industry and for those who follow corporate news of Sony and Sega, will probably remember the name of Bernie Stolar.

It was reported during the weekend that Bernie Solar passed away last week and confirmed by friends.

For Sega Of America and the former Playstation parent company/Sony subsidiary Sony Computer Of America he was an important person as he was respectively the former president when Sega Dreamcast was launched and was a SCEA founding member.

But before Sega and Sony, his career started on 1980 after graduating from University Of California where he joined its first gaming industry company called Pacific Novelty Manufacturing, one of the name behind arcade machines and his tenure called the attention of Atari, that succeed in hiring him to lead their arcade division at the same year.

During his tenure on Atair, Stolar emphasized all opportunities for Atari in terms of house game consoles but was particularly known for the development of the handheld Lynx, which managed to have two generations before being discontinued in favor of the Jaguar.

Before the Lynx II, Bernie Stolar was already Sony's in-bound as he knew the Japanese company had a fallout with Nintendo and decided to go on their own after Nintendo Playstaiton as a Super Nintendo mid-cycle upgrade did not go as planned.

He co-founded what we became to know as Sony Computer Of America and accepted the VP meanwhile the console was successfully launched in 1995 and was directly involved in Sony's takes on games like  Crash Bandicoot, Ridge Racer, Oddworld Inhabitants, Spyro The Dragon and Battle Arena Toshinden.

After witnessing his take on the Playstation's victory over the Sega Saturn, Stolar accepted the position of Sega Of America's President and immediately finished the job acknowledging that he was ready to make Sega be particularly ready to answer back to Playstation.

Hence the Sega Dreamcast, which was a success initially but being ahead of its time and Sega not fully recovered from the financial losses that Sega Saturn itself brought, Sega was in a No Way Out situation and needed to embrace a new reality to become a third party publisher facing bankruptcy.

In the list of success on being the head of Sega beside the Dreamcast launch itself, it was the founding of what is now know as 2K Games with the purchase of studio Visual Concept that created the NBA 2K and the disappeared NFL 2K games, which after Sega's dismissal as a gaming console creator, 2K Games was reorganized as a whole new independent studio.

Following Sega's tenure, he went to lead the Mattel interactive division from 1999 to 2005, where he joined Adscape Media and thanks to his doing, the gaming company that was bought by Google in less than a year that Stolar joined and served as Google' Gamer Evangelist until 2009 where he had a short tenure as GetFugu head.

Finally, Bernie Stolar's professional career has been chairman of ZOOM Platform and the Jordan Freeman Group, ironically, its first NON-gaming tenures.

Rest in Peace! 

Source: GamerBeats