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.

Game journalism Zero Punctuation

Zero Punctuation is a video-review series Croshaw released every Wednesday on The Escapist archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20231107064811/https://twitter.com/YahtzeeCroshaw/status/1721687212541280425 archive-date = 2023-11-07 url-status = live image = Yahtzee Croshaw, Mana Bar co-owner, at its opening, Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia 100320.jpg

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. He also wrote a selection of interactive fiction games through Z-Code, including Offensive Probing, Arthur Yahtzee: The Curse of Hell's Cheesecake, The Sorcerer's Appraisal, and the Countdown trilogy tied to his Chzo Mythos.

Croshaw then developed many freeware games The Trials of Odysseus Kent, the four part Chzo Mythos, Adventures In The Galaxy Of Fantabulous Wonderment, the 1213 series, and Trilby: The Art of Theft.

The latter two games were noted for pushing the engine beyond what it was designed for. He had previously charged to access the special editions for several of these games, but released everything for free in 2009. Builds of the Chzo Mythos and other games were released in 2010 for Linux on icculus.org, later updated in 2015 to the now open source AGS runtime.

In April 2012,

In a 2014 Vice interview, Croshaw disclosed that he had been asked to pitch a script for the then-in-development Duke Nukem Forever by a producer. He did so, however the script was rejected due to not fitting the producer's vision of Duke Nukem as a character.

In 2015, Croshaw released the mobile game Hatfall in collaboration with Addicting Games and Defy Media. and ultimately came out on Steam on 24 May 2024. It received a positive review from Screen Rant, and a mixed review from Hardcore Gamer.

Yahtzee does all the artwork for his games himself in Microsoft Paint, lending his games what Wonder How Two described as "a delightfully old-school Sierra look, like in King's Quest 3." The music in a number of his games was composed by Mark Lovegrove.

Writing

In the 2000s Croshaw created a number of webcomics, namely Chris and Trilby, Cowboy Comics!, The Adventures of Angular Mike, and Yahtzee Takes On The World!, which ran from 20 December 2000, to 22 September 2002. He also uploaded two unpublished novels to his website, Fog Juice and Articulate Jim: A Search for Something.

Croshaw was previously a staff writer for the Adventure Gamers website.

In 2010, Croshaw's first published novel Mogworld, was released by Dark Horse Books. The Quads Kelly Baker described the book as "very funny, but [...] also surprisingly disturbing to boot." In 2019, its sequel Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash was published as an audiobook on Audible; a print version followed in 2020.

In 2018, Croshaw's fourth novel Differently Morphous was published as an audiobook, with a print version following on 10 April 2019.