Ben Croshaw

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"Don't you think it's weird how so many awards these days look like rough crystal formations freshly carved from the rock? Oh I guess you wouldn't know because YOU DON'T WIN AWARDS"

The British born and Australia residing Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw 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 video game designing. Most of this work (and a bit more) can be accessed through his personal site: Fully Ramblomatic.com

Another recent real-world project of his was opening a bar with four friends known as 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.

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, Art of Theft, among others. All of these can found at Yahtzee's personal site/blog, Fully Ramblomatic.com

He has also written a novel, Mogworld, released by Dark Horse Books in August 2010. It is 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

Not to be confused with the boardgame Yahtzee.

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Early, incomplete and ultimately disowned work

• 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.

• Yahtzee Takes On The World - A webcomic which features the same 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 accidently causing The End of the World as We Know It, and forcing humanity and themselves to abandon Earth.

• 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 series was positively received in the AGS community, which caused Yahtzee to develop a case of Small Name, Big Ego. Eventually he ended up being in bad standing with the community and he then choose to abandon it.

• 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.

• 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 very much playable, and it can be still found by digging around on the Fully Ramblomatic Forums.

• Reality On The Norm - A collaborative community project, involving creating adventure games set in a Shared Universe: a quirky City of Adventure. Croshaw himself created the first game to be set in the universe, Lunchtime of the Damned, but have since then only contributed one additional game, The Sorceror's Appraisal.

Newer work

• The Trials of Odysseus Kent - An Adventure Game which Yahtzee released together with a formal apology to the AGS community. The game was inspired by the original Monkey Island, and features Odysseus Kent, a weird white skinned boy who searches for treasure in a provincial town where time never passes.

• 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.

• Twelve Thirteen - Another experiment with the AGS engine. This one revolved around creating a platformer á la Flashback, and it turned out better. Also has its own article.

• 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. Also has its own article.
  • An episode of Zero Punctuation has Yahtzee (ironically) saying Fantasy World Dizzy was "the best game ever", which he made a Let's Play of in February 2012 here.

• Trilby: The Art of Theft - A Gaiden Game to Chzo Mythos based on the code from 1213. It evolves around Trilby traveling to the USA to steal from the rich and famous over there; he does, however, quickly run into trouble.

• 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 considered dead, though a new trailer was recently created.

• 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.
  • The novel was inspired by three months of playing World of Warcraft, as stated in this promo, where he says "I got the idea after I stopped playing World of Warcraft, because, for some reason, I had a lot of free time then."
    • Hilariously, in his review of Age of Conan he mentions that one of his biggest problems with MMORPGs is "I hate when I look back at my time with a MMORPG and realized that I've just flushed away months of my life that I could have spent writing a best-selling book or raising a child or pounding nails into my face."

• Poacher - A Metroidvania Freeware game made in Game Maker. 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 trailer can be viewed here and the game can be downloaded here.

• Let's Play - In March 2012, Yahtzee started a series of Let's Plays with his friend Gabriel, featuring games from their collective childhoods on his YouTube channel. The games LPed so far are:
  • Fantasy World Dizzy
  • Alex Kidd in Hi-Tech World
  • Dreamweb
  • Hugo 2: Whodunit
  • Future Wars

Work in progress

• 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.

• Fun Space Game: The Game - Work in progress. After lamenting the fact that no one had made a good 3D flying game in a while, he decided to make one.

• Untitled horror game - So far, the only known detail about this project is that it will be another game in AGS engine. Has not been officially announced or anything of the ilk, simply idly mentioned on a forum discussion on Something Awful.

• Art of Theft sequel - So far, the only known detail about this project is that it will be made with the Game Maker program.