Call of Duty 4 Wins Big at BAFTAs

The GAME British Academy Video Games Awards (BAFTAs) are over and the biggest winner was Call of Duty 4. The awards took place at the London Hilton on Park Lane, and were hosted by games aficionado Dara O’Briain. At this gala event some of last year’s biggest games were honored in various categories, while Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was given the BAFTA FELLOWSHIP Award for his contributions to the industry over his long and interesting career.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the biggest winner of this year’s BAFTA video game awards, picking up top honors in the Action & Adventure, Gameplay, Story and Character categories - along with the only category voted on by players - the GAME Award of 2008. Dead Space also did pretty well, landing awards for Original Score and Use of Audio, while Super Mario Galaxy won the Best Game award this year.

A full list of the categories, nominees and this year’s winners can be found after the break (winners highlighted in bold).

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Nolan Bushnell to Receive BAFTA Fellowship

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts, best described as the UK’s version of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is an organization “dedicated to the recognition and promotion of excellence in the fields of the moving image”. What makes BAFTA unique is that it fully recognizes video games as a part of the entertainment industry. This year, BAFTA announced that it will be honoring video game pioneer Nolan Bushnell with a fellowship at this year’s GAME British Academy Video Games Awards.

Bushnell first made a name for himself back in 1972 when he co-founded a little game company known as Atari and started the video game revolution with Pong. While Pong wasn’t the first video game marketed to the public, it was the first to achieve widespread popularity in both the arcade and home console markets. One urban legend is that the sheer number of people playing Pong was so high that it actually caused a coin shortage in the US, with additional coins being minted to meet demand.

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Nolan Bushnell Bets Big on GameWager

So, what do you get when you cross the brains behind Atari and Chuck E. Cheese with the high stakes action of a Vegas-like casino? Apparently, you get an online venture called GameWager.

Nolan Bushnell, one of the founding fathers of the video game industry, has signed up as “executive advisor” to add a new layer of competition to PC gaming. The new service is designed for gamers of all skill levels, and allows gamers to earn virtual tokens for completing in-game actions like kills, objectives, and team wins in multiplayer PC games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2. Hardcore gamers can also wager tokens against each other in real-time to settle virtual trash talking. The company is also planning to add games like Left 4 Dead and World of Warcraft into the mix.

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