BAFTA Fellow Will Wright to present the Annual Lecture

London, 17 October 2007/... The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) is delighted to announce that Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, and recipient of this year's coveted British Academy Video Games Awards Fellowship will be presenting the Annual Lecture on 24 October in the Princess Anne Theatre at BAFTA's headquarters at 195 Piccadilly in central London.

The subject of the lecture, chosen by Will himself, will be "Interactive Entertainment - the Oldest Art Form". The evening will commence at 6pm with a champagne reception. The Lecture which takes place during London Games Festival, will start at 6:45pm, followed by a Q&A, and is likely to conclude at 8:30pm.

There are a limited number of tickets to this event, which are free but will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. A maximum of 2 per person are available. Call Jo Stein on 0207 292 5818.

Wright becomes the first recipient of the Fellowship in this sector, in recognition of his huge creative contribution to the video games industry. It will be presented to him at the Awards ceremony, which is being held at London's Battersea Evolution on 23 October. His current project is the highly anticipated Spore in which players get to create their own species and control their evolution, from single-celled micro-organisms swimming around in a primordial soup, to fully realising their galaxy-conquering evolutionary potential.

About Will Wright:

Will Wright is widely accepted as one of the world's leading visionaries in the field of video game design, and has been passionately creating games for more than twenty years. Although he has worked on a number of hugely successful games, among them Raid On Bungling Bay (1984), SimCity (1989), SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCity 3000 (1989) and SimCity 4 (2003), he is best known for bringing to fruition one of the best-loved games franchises in history, The Sims - a game whose inspiration sprang from a combination of the aforementioned titles.

About BAFTA:

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is the UK's leading organisation dedicated to the recognition and promotion of excellence in the fields of the moving image. Renowned for its high profile Film & Television Awards ceremonies, the prestigious BAFTA mask has long been seen as a symbol of excellence.

For more information, please contact:

Tom Sargent or Stu Taylor at Barrington Harvey: Tel: 01462 456780 tom.sargent@bhpr.co.uk stuart.taylor@bhpr.co.uk