News

Minecraft Creator Is Winner Of This Year’s BAFTA Special Award

The British Academy Video Game Awards will award Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson with its “Special Award” at this year’s ceremony, it said today.


February 18, 2012
In Real Life

LA Noire And Batman: Arkham City Lead Nominations For British Video Game Awards

Just like a comic-book plotline where two crimefighters battle it out to find out who’s best, the members of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts will decide whether Cole Phelps and Batman had the better video game.


February 24, 2010
News

Who’s Honouring Miyamoto Now?

BAFTA! That’s the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to the rest of you not on an acronym basis with the academy. And they’re giving the creator of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros fellowship props.


February 17, 2010
News

2009 BAFTA Video Game Award Nominees Are In

The annual British Academy Video Game Awards has revealed this year’s nominees, with Assassin’s Creed II, Uncharted 2, Modern Warfare 2, and Arkham Asylum poised to win big, and the GAME Award of 2009 awaiting your votes.


March 11, 2009
News

BAFTA Video Game Awards Happening Now

The GAME British Academy Video Games Awards are starting to be handed out in the UK. So far the official BAFTA Twitter has named a few winners.


January 30, 2009
In Real Life

Nolan Bushnell To Be Awarded BAFTA Fellowship

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts will bestow their highest honour at this years GAME British Academy Video Games Awards to the gather of Atari and pioneer of Pong, Nolan Bushnell.


October 30, 2007
Uncategorized

Golden Joystick Winners As Bad As BAFTA’s

Man, those BAFTA awards were nutty. Games in the wrong category, games nominated that weren’t even out yet…what a mess. Were the Golden Joysticks any better? We’d love to say “yes”, but are going to instead bust out a resounding “no”. Why? Because of the award’s scheduling, the winners list reads exactly like a list of…the best games of 2006. Full list of winners after the jump, but know Gears of War and Guitar Hero II feature prominently.


October 26, 2007
Uncategorized

BAFTA Gallery

The 2007 British Academy Video Games Awards wrapped up yesterday, and while we’ve already brought you the list of winners and losers, we didn’t bring you what is possibly the most important thing to come out of the gaming BAFTAs every year: pictures of people getting awards in England. Luckily for us they had some sort of staff photographer on hand who seems genuinely good at what he or she does, so the day is saved! At the top you’ll see the legendary Will Wright getting his award from television producer Hilary Bevan Jones. More pictures of people I don’t recognise follow!

Gallery after the jump.


October 25, 2007
Uncategorized

BAFTA Is A Big Joke, Everyone Knows

Kotaku AU

Glad to see someone else has the same opinion as me on the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Game Awards.

Back on Atomic, I did an editorial on the BAFTAs in 2005, when Half-Life 2 made a close-to-clean sweep of the proceedings. It even managed to pick up an award for Best Online, despite at the time not having an online component.

What surprised me even more was that in ’05, Peter Molyneux was on the board for the Game Awards. WTF indeed.

When that sort of crap happens, you know there’s someone behind the scenes who’s a few cans short of a six pack. From that point onwards, the BAFTA Game Awards, at least for me, became a complete joke.

Sadly, things have not improved in two years.

Carlos Bergfeld over at Shacknews has his own editorial up on this year’s awards and how he considers them to be a bumbled operation:

Looking at this year’s list of nominations as well as the official rules for eligibility on BAFTA’s site shows how the game awards have quickly become a sham. Eight of the titles nominated for awards this year had not yet been released in Europe, with seven of them unreleased in any territory, making it highly improbable that each of the category juries made up of seven to nine developers and publishers had played or even seen a significant portion of these games.

Personally – the BAFTA Game Awards should be scrapped until there are people with some, oh… I don’t know, familiarity with the industry running the show. Just stop, please, before I die from laughter.

Editorial: BAFTA’s Games Awards Have Failed Us [Shacknews]


October 24, 2007
Uncategorized

BAFTA Winners, Losers Announced

The gaming BAFTAs just wound up in London. Full list of winners are after the jump, so for now, we’re just going to generalise. List the big winners, the big losers. Wii Sports, it was a big winner, cleaning up in six categories. Okami, it won too, nabbing two awards. Which is also how many God of War II took home. BioShock only won a single award, so lucky it was for Best Game. And the losers? Well, the PS3 didn’t win squat. Neither did the handhelds. Not even the DS.