At 68, Bernie Stolar is still running ambitious game startups

Bernie Stolar has been in the video game business for three decades. And at 68, he’s not about to stop. He loves the industry, and he figures he’ll die if he stops doing what he loves.

Stolar recently became the chief operating officer of Elemental Path, the maker of the upcoming CogniToys, smart, connected toys that use the artificial intelligence of IBM’s Watson supercomputer to hold conversations with children. Watson is famous for beating human players at Jeopardy. It’s a promising startup, one of many that Stolar has worked at.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.