Before the BAFTA Games Awards, there was a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards ceremony, held between 1998–2002. It was primarily for multimedia entertainment which included video games and video game related media and multimedia websites.
Hosts included Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish (aka Adam and Joe), Phill Jupitus, Rhona Cameron, and Stephen Fry and there were over 30 different categories. It was so cool seeing lots of familiar names amongst the winners and nominees and some odd ones I’d never heard of before, like Ceremony of Innocence, a mystery narrative game released in 1997, produced by Peter Gabriel’s Real World Multimedia. Perhaps one of the weirdest winners was MindGym which won the 1998 Comedy Award which featured a Woody Allen-looking character in the Thinking Man’s pose dressed in nothing but a pair of Y-fronts, socks, and tennis shoes.
In 2003, BAFTA split the awards into the BAFTA Interactive Awards and BAFTA Games Awards before retiring the former in 2004 and bringing the Games Awards back in 2006. We’re not likely to get such peculiarities winning awards anymore but it’s nice to look back.