"... but as I sat in my office waiting for the phone to ring, miserably holding it in, it occurred to me that the whole reason I became an artist was to take all of my inner pains and miseries and force the rest of the world to share them. It's something I have in common with spree killers."
— Yahtzee's Dev Diary, Episode 17
Benjamin Richard "Yahtzee" Croshaw (born 24 May 1983) is a British-born and US (formerly Australian)-residing comedic writer, author, video game journalist, podcaster, and video game developer. He is perhaps best known for Zero Punctuation, but he does have a bit more on his conscience internet-wise.
Besides being a video game critic, Yahtzee also has experience in the field of writing and game design. Most of this work (and a bit more) can be accessed through his personal site: Fully Ramblomatic.com.
In addition, he did a Let's Play series in his spare time called Let's Drown Out, which can be found on his YouTube channel here. The series has since ended due to Yahtzee's move to America, with the final episode having been uploaded on August 27, 2016.
He was also one of the founders of the Mana Bar, a place where people can drink and play games. After initial success in Brisbane, Mana Bar Melbourne had its grand opening on July 16, 2011, a success that saw a line to get in that ran around the block. The bar unfortunately closed its doors on May 24, 2015.
After being a part of The Escapist for 16 years, Yahtzee resigned from the site on November 2023 (along with every other video producer on the site) in protest to the sudden firing of then-editor-in-chief Nick Calandra. Almost immediately afterwards, Yahtzee and Calandra announced they were co-launching a new creator-owned channel, Second Wind, as a platform for former Escapist creators to continue their work independently through viewer support. Following this shift, it was announced that — due to issues of IP ownership — Zero Punctuation would come to a close, but its successor, returning to its very original title Fully Ramblomatic, would continue in its place.
Yahtzee also makes his own games, mostly adventure games. They include the Chzo Mythos, Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, 1213, and the Mythos' Gaiden Game, The Art of Theft, among others, and he is currently working on the upcoming game Starstruck Vagabond. All of these can be found at Yahtzee's personal site/blog, Fully Ramblomatic.com
He has also written several novels:
- Mogworld (released by Dark Horse Books in August 2010): Not a comic/graphic novel, as one might expect coming from Dark Horse, but a "proper wordy thinky brainy book" and "an idea I've been kicking around ever since those dark, unproductive three months I spent playing World of Warcraft. It's a bit of a cynical take on MMOs and the standard Tolkienesque 'fantasy' setting." More info can be found here.
- Jam (released in October 2012): In his words, the book is "about an apocalypse. With jam in it."
- Jack McKweon
- Will Save the Galaxy for Food (released in February 2017)
- Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash (released in June 2020)
- Will Leave the Galaxy for Good (released in April 2024)
- Differently Morphous (released on Audible in March 2018, with a paper release coming through Dark Horse in April 2019)
- Existentially Challenged (released in December 2021)
He is not to be confused with the board game Yahtzee. He also prefers the name "Yahtzee" to his real name, to the point that he often has to remind fans not to call him Ben since everybody in his personal life calls him Yahtzee except his parents. In Let's Drown Out, he explained that he mostly stopped using his given name when he first moved to Australia, and local associates asked what he wanted to be called (Australian nicknaming conventions being what they are); he said that he associated being called "Ben" with unhappy childhood memories and difficult family relationships, so to him the handle of "Yahtzee" is associated with creative freedom and greater self-expression.
Works by Yahtzee:
The inviable one:
- Zero Punctuation — Started out as a couple of experimental video reviews, but it caught attention fast and was soon after picked up by The Escapist and became a permanent weekly serial. It was Yahtzee's ticket to mainstream fame and remains his most famous and discussed piece of work.
Literature:
- Mogworld — A novel published in collaboration with Dark Horse Comics. It tells the tale of Jim, a student mage who has been resurrected in undead form after being dead for sixty years by a "rogue necromancer", and now he wants nothing more than to die again, which is not an easy task since a weird plague that causes immortality has infected a lot of people in the country, including himself. Unbeknownst to Jim, this is because he is actually a NPC in a popular MMORPG.
- "Exhaustion From Having Sex With a Minor", a short story printed in the Machine of Death anthology. A free audio version of the story, read by Yahtzee himself, is available here.
- Jam — A post-apocalyptic novel, that follows a small group of survivors in a world where the remains of civilization has been covered in a weird, red, sticky substance that smells distinctly of strawberries.
- Will Save the Galaxy for Food — the third novel to be published by Dark Horse Comics, it tells the tale of a space explorer with unemployment hanging over his head after "some thoughtless bastards invent cheap, easy teleportation with limitless range, making all the heroic star pilots redundant".
- Differently Morphous — A fantasy novel, and Yahtzee's first to initially be released as an Audible exclusive; a paperback version was released in 2019. Follows a group of government agents attempting to hunt down a magical serial killer causing chaos in the English countryside.
- Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash — The sequel to Will Save the Galaxy for Food.
- Existentially Challenged — The sequel to Differently Morphous.
Video Games:
- The Arthur Yahtzee Trilogy — A series of Adventure Games which features Arthur Yahtzee, a sort of a Life Embellished character of Yahtzee himself. The trilogy spans over the episodes Friday: Death to Arthur Yahtzee, Saturday: Arthur's Odyssey and Yesterday: The D-Gate, in which Yahtzee respectively fights mutants and time travelers and causes the destruction of The Multiverse in order to defeat the Big Bad.
- Reality-On-The-Norm — A collaborative community project, involving creating adventure games set in a Shared Universe: a quirky City of Adventure. Yahtzee himself created the first game to be set in the universe, Lunchtime of the Damned, but has since then only contributed one additional game, The Sorceror's Appraisal.
- The Rob Blanc Trilogy — The first games Yahtzee made in the Adventure Games Studio engine. The player takes control over everyman Rob Blanc, who finds himself randomly appointed Defender of the Universe by the so-called High Ones. The series consists of Better Days of a Defender of the Universe, Planet of the Pasteurised Pestilence and The Temporal Terrorists. The games are essentially a tribute to Sierra's classic Adventure Games such as Space Quest.
- The Trials of Odysseus Kent — An adventure game inspired by The Secret of Monkey Island, and features Odysseus Kent, a weird white skinned boy who searches for treasure in a provincial town where time never seem to pass.
- Poseidon 12 — An experiment with the AGS engine. It revolved around making The Sims-esque game on a space station. It apparently takes places After the End in the same universe as YTOTW. It never got out of beta, and is absent from the game page on Fully Ramblomatic, which makes it an Orphaned Game. It is, however, still (more-or-less) playable, and it can be still found on the Fully Ramblomatic Forums here.
- Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment — A hybrid between an Adventure Game and an Economic Simulation Game with elements of a Wide-Open Sandbox. And a good chunk of the gameplay consists of beaming down legions of Red Shirts on planets for them to meet a horrible and entertaining demise. Fun!
- Chzo Mythos — A series that started with the slasher inspired 5 Days A Stranger, and its Recycled In Space sequel 7 Days A Skeptic. The third game, Trilby's Notes, added in a larger plot with a Eldritch Abomination and an evil cult, which was resolved in the final game, 6 Days A Sacrifice. It has its own article for those wishing to learn more.
- 1213 — Another experiment with the AGS engine. This one revolved around creating a Cinematic Platform Game รก la Flashback.
- Trilby: The Art of Theft — A Gaiden Game to Chzo Mythos based on the code from Twelve-Thirteen. It evolves around Trilby traveling to the USA to steal from the rich and famous over there; he does, however, quickly run into trouble.
- Poacher — A Metroidvania freeware game made in Game Maker, taking inspiration from games such as Cave Story. The player takes on the role of Derek Badger, a simpleminded and stoic poacher from Yorkshire who ends up underground one foggy evening, and by unwittingly helping a spirit he gets entangled in an old war.
- The Consuming Shadow — A Lovecraftian Roguelike, citing Eternal Darkness and FTL: Faster Than Light as its main inspirations, in which a paranormal investigator frantically attempts to put together a ritual in 72 hours in order to stop a terrifying ancient god from entering our world, fighting both the god's hideous minions and his own rapidly deteriorating sanity in the process. Released commercially.
- Hatfall — It is, to use his own words, "the official Zero Punctuation game for browsers and tablets designed by me and without a doubt the greatest interactive hat putting on simulator called Hatfall ever devised by man!"
- Yahtzee's Dev Diary projects:
- Starstruck Vagabond — A "feature-length" game he's had on the backburner since before the Dev Diary series. A cross between Stardew Valley and Elite Dangerous. A daring space captain by the name of Jaques McKeown accidentally puts themself in suspended animation for 2,000 years and takes up delivering crates as a day job.
Webcomics:
- Yahtzee Takes On The World — A webcomic which features Arthur Yahtzee as the main character, this time as a wannabe Evil Genius who struggles against governments and a Mirror Universe to Take Over the World together with his loyal crew. The comic ended with Arthur Yahtzee and his team accidentally causing The End of the World as We Know It, and forcing humanity and themselves to abandon Earth.
- The Adventures Of Angular Mike — A rather surrealistic webcomic which, beside the titular character, features a talking drawer, The Beatles and an invisible hentai girl amongst others. Ended up as an Orphaned Series.
- Cowboy Comics — A series of cheap western-book-covers-cut-outs with added speech bubbles. Also the only part of Yahtzee's old work he himself considers "alright".
- Chris and Trilby — A webcomic featuring the master thief Trilby and the dimwitted Chris Quinn on wacky and "completely heterosexual" adventures. Also an Orphaned Series.
Web Video:
- Let's Drown Out — In March 2012, Yahtzee started a series of Let's Plays with his friend (the Nick Frost to his Simon Pegg) Gabriel, featuring games from their collective childhoods on his YouTube channel. Yahtzee and Gabriel alternate LP duties each game, with Yahtzee starting it off with Fantasy World Dizzy. Prior to the Flashback video, they were pre-recorded and consisted of retro adventure games. Starting with
Quake 2, they were labeled as Let's Drown Out, which starts as a standard Let's Play of a game that's uninteresting to look at before they get bored talking about the game and instead talk podcast-style topics, which is what some of their past videos turned into anyway. The games drowned out tend to be older games that haven't aged well more often than not, but they do sometimes play games they like played in such a way to make it boring to watch. - Jim and Yahtzee's Rhymedown Spectacular — Another series for The Escapist where he and Jim Sterling (of the Jimquisition) read poetry they wrote about video games. Followed by...
- Uncivil War — A show from the Escapist, featuring Yahtzee and Jim Sterling going head-to-head in unconventional game challenges.
- Judging By The Cover — Yahtzee examines the cover of anything taking his fancy, be it videogame cases, movie posters etc. and gives his views on the first impressions that may or may not spring to mind. Its last upload was in October 2017 and both Yahtzee and an editor from the Escapist eventually confirmed separately that the series wouldn't be continuing.
- Yahtzee's Dev Diary — Yahtzee, as a personal challenge and creative exercise, pledged to develop 12 small-scale games in 12 months. The episodes, published every other week, document the creation and development process of each game, as well as containing random bits of insight from Yahtzee's part on video game development and other topics. It has since been followed up with a second season, wherein Yahtzee explains the development process of his long-term game project with the Working Title Space Game, later retitled Starstruck Vagabond.
- Slightly Civil War — Based on Uncivil War (see above), it features Yahtzee and Jack Packard, who are randomly assigned a position on a contentious video game topic and head to battle to make their point.
- Adventure Is Nigh — An Actual Play video series using the Dungeons & Dragons system. Co-starring alongside KC Nwosu, Amy Campbell, Jesse Galena, and Jack Packard, Yahtzee plays the role of Mortimer Rafflesworth Everwind-Smythe, a half-elf Gentleman Thief.
- Fully Ramblomatic — A Creator-Driven Successor to Zero Punctuation; created in the wake of Yahtzee's resignation from Escapist Magazine following the termination of editor-in-chief Nick Calandra. Named after Yahtzee's personal website.
Other projects:
- Game Damage — A television show in the making featuring Yahtzee as one of the hosts. The show's cast includes Yahtzee, Matt and Yug (the latter two the co-owners of australiangamer.com) commenting on various elements of the gaming world, including reviews and discussion of upcoming games. The show also features rant sections done by each of the hosts and sketch comedy influenced by the gaming community (such as Master Chief walking around a mall or the design team of Duke Nukem Forever sitting around bashing their heads against walls). Was ultimately not picked up for broadcast, and can be considered dead.
