The big winners at this year's British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta) Games Awards include Her Story, Rocket League, and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. But none of them claimed the coveted crown of Best Game—nor, I'm sorry to say, did The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which was shut out across the board.
The top honor this year went to Bethesda's shooter-RPG Fallout 4, which beat out The Witcher, along with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Life is Strange, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, and Rocket League for the title. But Her Story took gold in three categories—Debut Game, Game Innovation, and Best Mobile and Handheld—while Rocket League got three of its own, for Family Game, Sports Game, and (obviously) Multiplayer. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture came awfully closed to that mark too, claiming awards for Audio Achievement and Music, and being the game for which Merle Dandridge earned her Best Performer award.
The Bafta's highest honor, the Fellowship, was given this year to John Carmack. “At id Software, a company he founded in 1991 with designer Tom Hall, artist Adrian Carmack (no relation), and fellow programmer John Romero, Carmack worked on some of the best-remembered games of the era including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and Rage, titles that became iconic pieces of gaming and pop culture,” the Academy said in its writeup of Carmack, now the CTO at Oculus VR. “And while Virtual Reality may seem a world away from the technology with which Carmack began his career, he maintains that solving the technical obstacles is remarkably like stepping back in time to the early days of id.”
The full list of winners:
- Artistic Achievement: Ori and the Blind Forest
- Audio Achievement: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
- Best Game: Fallout 4
- British Game: Batman—Arkham Knight
- Debut Game: Her Story
- Family Game: Rocket League
- Game Design: Bloodborne
- Game Innovation: Her Story
- Mobile & Handheld: Her Story
- Multiplayer Game: Rocket League
- Music: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
- Original Property: Until Dawn
- Performer: Merle Dandridge, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
- Persistent Game: Prison Architect
- Sports Game: Rocket League
- Story: Life is Strange
