The Escapist is an online magazine covering games and the gaming industry. Zero Punctuation was a weekly series by reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw. ZP is a video essay given in the format of no punctuation. It has been around for a long time and probably was the only thing keeping The Escapist afloat for a while.
To give context for "a long time" - I believe it was started in 07/08. I remember when it was still "Fully Ramblomatic Reviews".
To give context for "only thing keeping The Escapist afloat" - this isn't the first time The Escapist has imploded. Around 2013/2014(?) there was a big blowup, I think The Escapist was bought out, and the new owners terminated a bunch of people and only (really) kept on ZP. The owners basically bought The Escapist for ZP. They ran as a skeleton for quite a few years, and recently (2021?) they started doing more stuff. Their 3 Minute Reviews have been pretty good, and the Cold Take series has been great.
This is disappointing for me. I thought they were going in a good direction. It's too bad that management decided that they didn't want to keep funding interesting, well considered voices.
It was officially started in 2005 with a format much closer to traditional magazines. It was a phase when people were making "e-zines", high quality PDFs distributed monthly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Escapist_(magazine)
*Edit: I'm referring to the whole publication, parent comment might've strictly meant the Zero Punctuation show.
That PDF-based "The Escapist" had some really great content some issues. Well researched, highly intellectual, and sometimes fascinatingly deep. That was the era I most followed The Escapist. Somewhere after that was when it fell out of my RSS feeds for being too shallow, I might have even blamed Zero Punctuation a bit for that at the time. That was always a weird dichotomy to me of well researched magazine on the one side and shallow, fast-paced, rambling video reviews on the other. I enjoyed some of the ZP takes at the time and I appreciate Yahtzee's ability to deliver interesting points sometimes, but it was always something I felt was of the vanguard of "shallow clickbait" that every game site had to be soon after that.
Anyway, I thought The Escapist died a long time ago, it's fun to reminisce about the one that I liked the most and to hear from everyone else about this later The Escapist that has died even to the point of angering the golden calf of ZP itself.
Yeah - sorry - I was referring to ZP exclusively. I had an indefinite reference (entirely my fault, I’m having a tough week), but I appreciate the history on The Escapist! Good info!
It’s a computer game thing most commonly known for Zero Punctuation, a review format. It sets itself apart by no punctuation and no pictures of the game being reviewed. Here’s Elden Ring: https://youtu.be/BW_h1zD2luY
Thanks! I feel cheated though, there’s plenty of punctuation! If you switch on the subtitles, it features periods commas and question marks more or less where I hear them. It’s just someone talking annoyingly fast.
The website is "games industry biz", and the first word of the article is "journalists". If you aren't familiar with Yahtzee, Zero Punctuation, or the Escapist, then that's really all the background you need.
