Yahtzee Croshaw

Benjamin Richard "Yahtzee" Croshaw (born 24 May 1983) is a British journalist, video game critic and developer, author, and humourist. He is best known for his video game review series Zero Punctuation, which he produced for The Escapist from 2007 to 2023, and its spiritual successor Fully Ramblomatic, which he releases through Second Wind.

Croshaw has developed and released over two dozen indie games, including both freeware and commercial titles. He has also published six novels through Dark Horse Books. Outside of creative works, Croshaw was one of four founders of the Mana Bar, an Australian cocktail bar and video gaming lounge which opened in 2010, and had closed by 2015.

Zero Punctuation is a video-review series Croshaw released every Wednesday on The Escapist between 2007 and 2023. The series began with his review of the demo of The Darkness, which quickly grew in popularity. After one more review covering Fable: The Lost Chapters, Croshaw was hired to continue the series on The Escapist. Reviews were typically posted initially on The Escapist's site, then uploaded to The Escapist's YouTube channel a week later. The addition of the series to The Escapist led to a large growth in site traffic, and the series became the most popular feature on The Escapist, with each episode consistently receiving hundreds of thousands of views, and the most popular episodes surpassing a million views.

Throughout the series's lifetime, Croshaw became known for his rapid-fire delivery (from which the series's title is derived), along with his harsh critique of both the games he reviewed and the broader video game industry, as well as the crude humour and illustrations contained in his reviews. Additionally, Croshaw coined the term "PC Master Race" in one review, which then became common parlance among PC gamers. Reviews are roughly five minutes in length, and contained no numerical rating or score, as Croshaw called them "fucking nonsense when you're criticizing from a subjective artistic standpoint."

6 November 2023

On 6 November 2023, Croshaw announced his resignation from The Escapist alongside other colleagues following the abrupt firing of editor-in-chief Nick Calandra that same day, effectively ending Zero Punctuation as a series. Two days later, Calandra and Croshaw announced the creation of Second Wind, a new outlet on which Croshaw would continue weekly video-reviews under the title Fully Ramblomatic.

Croshaw's first publicly released game was the Arthur Yahtzee trilogy created in Visual Basic 3 and released in 1998. He also wrote a selection of interactive fiction games through Z-Code, including Offensive Probing, Arthur Yahtzee: The Curse of Hell's Cheesecake, The Sorceror's Appraisal, and the Countdown trilogy tied to his Chzo Mythos.

Croshaw then developed many freeware games in Adventure Game Studio from 2000 to 2007, including the Rob Blanc trilogy, Lunchtime of the Damned (the inaugural episode of Reality-On-The-Norm), The Trials of Odysseus Kent,^{[verification needed]} the four part Chzo Mythos, Adventures In The Galaxy Of Fantabulous Wonderment, the 1213 series, and Trilby: The Art of Theft.