Her Story, Rocket League win big at the 2016 Bafta Awards

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

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.