Bernie Stolar worked in the video game industry for several important companies. His career started at Atari where he worked initially in the coin-op arcade division and eventually moved over to the home division being in charge of platforms like Atari Lynx. Before the US release of the PlayStation game console, Sony made Stolar the first president of SCEA and in charge of the PlayStation platform. Stolar ruled with an iron fist and forced some unpopular policies with regard to titles licensed including a "no-RPG" policy seeing as RPGs at the time were almost all 2D, didn't sell well in North America and in his opinion failed to show the power of the PlayStation in a positive light.

After the first holiday season in the US the PlayStation was a success selling well. Bernie was then offered the opportunity to leave Sony and take the helm at Sega of America managing the Sega Saturn. Stolar while not as strict with licensing policies at Sega as he was at Sony decided against bringing over many of the most popular Saturn titles citing limited appeal in North America and failure to show off the Saturn in as positive of a light as possible as reasoning. As the Saturn continued to struggle in North America, Stolar pressed for Sega to develop a new platform which would eventually become the Dreamcast. While Stolar left the company a month prior to the US release of the system, Stolar is infamously credited with (though not necessarily accurately) helping prematurely kill the Saturn in favor of developing the Dreamcast.