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20 years of the BAFTA Games Awards
11.04.2024 - 13:55 / gamesindustry.biz
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Tonight, London’s Southbank Centre will host the 20th edition of the BAFTA Games Awards. For two decades, one of the most prestigious awards from the world of film and TV has held a dedicated ceremony to recognise excellence in video games and there are no signs of the organisation losing any of its interest or enthusiasm for the medium.
The industry is almost unrecognisable compared to when the first games BAFTAs were held. In 2004, the PlayStation 2 was still king, Xbox was a plucky newcomer to the space, retail was still the dominant channel for buying games, and mobile titles had arguably still peaked with the years-old Snake.
Over time, we’ve seen the rise of online multiplayer gaming, the smartphone revolution, the adoption of virtual reality, the expansion of the indie scene… the list goes on. And BAFTA’s head of games Luke Hebblethwaite says the organisation has done its best to evolve the awards accordingly.
“If you look back at BAFTA’s very first ceremony 20 years ago, it reflected a different, slightly more innocent time, we might say,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “It felt a bit more like a corporate conference event, whereas these days our awards stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the film and TV awards. They’re red carpet events, they’re high prestige, and they’re widely covered by the media.
"Film was seen as a lesser art and theatre, TV as lesser than film, and BAFTA was a pivotal organisation that helped change that. That can be our role in games too"
“The show itself has evolved quite a lot – if we kept the same categories that we had 20 years ago, those would look very outdated. We no longer have genre-based awards, we don’t have platform or device-based awards. 257 games were entered for the BAFTA games awards this year and they are across every device type, across all kinds of genres and games, and they are able to compete equally on equal footing with each other these days.
“BAFTA’s awards reflect the craft of making games, and we see those games that excel in what they’re doing get recognised by our voting members and our juries to place them amongst the best in our industry.”
There isn’t exactly a shortage of video game awards ceremonies – almost every industry conference has its own awards attached – but what makes the BAFTAs stand out is the prestige it brings from a history of recognising excellence in other entertainment sectors. Hebblethwaite emphasises that BAFTA itself is “an arts charity that exists to champion the creative and cultural importance” of entertainment, and games are a key medium within that mission.
“Coming from the heritage of film and TV that we have built up over those 75 years, BAFTA’s
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