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!
*Edit: I'm referring to the whole publication, parent comment might've strictly meant the Zero Punctuation show.