Ben Croshaw

Benjamin Richard Croshaw, better known by his Internet name "Yahtzee", is an English-born indie video game developer, gaming critic and writer. After several years of operating from Brisbane, Australia, he is currently situated in San Francisco, California.

In high school, Croshaw started developing games using Visual Basic 3 and Microsoft Paint. He started developing adventure games in Adventure Game Studio (AGS) in the early 2000s, which powered his Rob Blanc trilogy, among others. After a while, he left the AGS community in bad terms, but re-entered it afterwards to release games such as The Trials of Odysseus Kent and the first episode of the collaborative Reality-on-the-Norm series, called Lunchtime of the Damned. During this time, he released his best-known games: 5 Days A Stranger, 7 Days A Skeptic, Trilby's Notes, and 6 Days A Sacrifice, cumulatively known as the Chzo Mythos. He separated from the community again, but still developed games, primarily the 1213 series. He has since admitted to lurk in the AGS community under different names. He is to this day the most prized person in the AGS Awards, with a total of 53 nominations and 19 awards.

In 2007, Croshaw created two reviews for his blog, Fully Ramblomatic, using his trademark minimalist graphics and mostly static imagery, and talked with his signature fast rhetoric. He was immediately approached to by The Escapist Magazine, and had since been creating the Zero Punctuation video review series on a weekly basis. The show was characterized by a tongue-in-cheek humour and Yahtzee's tendency to point out and sometimes even deliberately exaggerate the bad sides of the games reviewed, as he believes the negative elements are not stressed enough in gaming journalism as opposed to the positive ones.

He was also the author of the Extra Punctuation column (later resurrected as video editorial series) on The Escapist's official website, which he writes twice a month. In 2015, he started the short-lived Judging By The Cover video series, which was the only remaining gaming-related video production under The Escapist label that year, alongside Zero Punctuation.

With The Escapist changing hands in the late 2010s, he was gradually more involved with video content, with post-Zero Punctuation streams, Dev Diary and appearing in Adventure is Nigh!, a Dungeons & Dragons campaign featuring The Escapist's content team at the time. On 6 November 2023, he voluntarily left The Escapist along the site's entire video content team, in a solidarity move towards the fired editor-in-chief Nick Calandra. Two days later, Croshaw and Calandra announced the Second Wind group which would continue creating content, with Croshaw himself running Fully Ramblomatic and Semi Ramblomatic as successors to Zero Punctuation and Extra Punctuation, respectively, as he did not own the intellectual property to the latter two.

Croshaw has continued with his gaming development in parallel with his critic work, releasing Poacher in 2012, and Hatfall and The Consuming Shadow in 2015. From 2019 to 2020, he created a series of 12 small games as part of the first season of his Dev Diary series, challenging himself to develop one game per month in one year. The result of the second season, Starstruck Vagabond, was released in 2024.

He is also the author of several webcomics and multiple novels: Mogworld, Jam, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Differently Morphous, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash and Existentially Challenged.