With Yahtzee having been around for a long while, a lot of the things he's said have become rather uncomfortable with the passage of time.
See this page for cases of this that are more funny than harsh.
- This quote from his review of The Walking Dead is not as funny after the closure of Telltale Games as of September 2018, and the subsequent termination of all ongoing projects.Telltale Games is a fucking one-company conservation effort. They're simultaneously trying to keep alive the point-and-click adventure game, the concept of episodic gameplay, every conceivable franchise that the original creator doesn't care about and which could always bleed out a few more pennies, and presumably also themselves if there's time left in the day.
- In his Top 5 of 2012 video, when talking about XCOM: Enemy Unknown, he mentions how reimagining a '90s franchise for the modern audience is sometimes a necessity. The game his avatar is holding during that sentence? Dungeon Keeper, whose reboot was widely panned for what many considered extreme pay-to-win gameplay.
- On a more meta level: the jokes about Yahtzee being the only contributor of The Escapist were the sad reality for a period of time, as most other contributors, like Stephanie Sterling, jumped ship.
- Related was his announcing in 2013 he'd be at the second annual Escapist Expo convention, saying "It's almost like it's a regular thing now." It would be the last Escapist Expo.
- His official resignation from the Escapist brings the harshness back with a vengeance.
- In the Top 5 of 2013 video, Numbers 4 and 3 indicate "Shaking hands with Kofi Annan" (Fourth Best), "Realizing your flies were unzipped the whole time you were shaking hands with Kofi Annan" (Fourth Worst), discovering that "It wasn't Kofi Annan at all, it was Nelson Mandela" (Third Best), and "Hang on, Nelson Mandela's dead, and you've just committed a massive faux pas at an open casket funeral" (Third Worst). Almost five years later, and we've come to the realization that Kofi Annan, too, has passed away.
- In his review of The Order: 1886, Yahtzee says that the plot of the game is "like if Kevin Spacey just flat-out hadn't appeared in the final mission and the final boss fight was instead with Kevin Spacey's pet Staffordshire Terrier, with Kevin Spacey mockingly saluting from a hang glider with 'Sequel Hook' written on it." With the sexual allegations against Spacey, that quote is starting to make fans and people very uncomfortable.
- His review of The Inpatient and DOOM VFR had him criticize the latter for getting too easy in the later levels, "when all the ridiculously powerful guns have been introducednote and are now just lying around everywhere like there was an earthquake in an American high school locker room."note The episode was first released on February 7, 2018, just one week before the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. Even worse, it was uploaded to YouTube just two hours before the shooting, with commentators immediately noticing the unfortunate timing.
- His "iPhone Games" video praises the mobile gaming scene as the place where actual innovation seems to be happening and that it's not full of the shameless cash grabs that he's come to expect from the console gaming industry. Fast forward to today, and a great many people will argue that almost none of those compliments are still valid with the rise of tons of Clash of Clans clones and predatory microtransaction practices in games that are ostensibly free but in reality exist almost entirely as engines by which to extract money from the player.
- When Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon came out he praised it for being a fun passion project created using the original game's engine. The later releases of Primal and New Dawn show that Ubisoft didn't hesitate to exploit that very passion in order to double-dip on profits for the series.
- Yahztee once made a joke about nobody visiting The Escapist on days besides Wednesdays. Said joke became a reality - at least up until the late-2018 announcement of the site being rebooted under mostly-new management, all of the site's other talent outside of Yahtzee left.
- Depending on your perspective this could also be considered Hilarious in Hindsight, but in his Ride to Hell: Retribution review: he opens with how he feels a wedge has been driven between him and fans of The Last of Us, complete with the graphic of a golf club being planted firmly in the ground. Come The Last of Us Part II and Joel is beaten to death by Abby with a golf club.
- On a grander scale, the "PC Master Race" joke he made quite some years ago was meant to be satire. Some players took it upon themselves as a serious title but were also thought to be relatively harmless people having a laugh about it. As the years passed, more and more of those players ended up being (or becoming) really obnoxious gatekeepers to gaming; leading Yahtzee himself becoming more and more jaded on them as the years passed with jokes about said "PC Master Race" getting less subtle. Finally, in his Kingdom Come: Deliverance review, he saw a group of those people praising the game's obnoxious design ideas and begging the developers to not change them because "if they do, the plebs might get into it", leading to him cursing a storm and now wishing he never used that term to describe those people.Yahtzee: Fuck you, toffee-nosed PC Master Race shitheads! I wish I'd named you something else now, like the "PC Gaming Dick-Slurp All-Stars"!
- Way, way back in his review of Halo 3 he complained that the story campaign was "criminally short, maybe eight to ten hours". The comment fields of that video on YouTube are filled with people from a decade or so later bemoaning the long-lost glory days when 8-10 hours was considered "short" for a full price shooter.
- Similarly his review of Firefall opened with a discussion on full priced games vs free-to-play games and included the observation "a game bought from a store might cost a hundred bucks, but at least you'll never somehow lose track of how much money you've spent on it". In the modern era of full-priced games stuffed to the gills with microtransactions of both the cosmetic and gameplay-enhancing variety and even randomised lootboxes, this statement comes across as incredibly tragic.
- In his review of the The Walking Dead (which, at the time of his review, only episodes 1 and 2 were out), he states that it would end either with the "evil military" coming in or "best case scenario, 2 to 4 of the least ass-holey survivors go and live on an island somewhere". He was... wrong. In fact, to quote a comment:Ellimation360: Ah hahaha, oh, none of the stereotypical endings happen...
- In fact, there have been cries for Yathzee to do a re-review for the game if only for the conclusion.
- His review of The Walking Dead Survival Instinct mentions him being emotionally hit hard by it.
- The part about Oliver not getting his mother back, taking up taxidermy and wearing her dresses in his review of Ni no Kuni becomes far darker once you find out that she doesn't come back.
- His review of Dead Space 3 contained a brief screed about EA's "innovation" of adding gameplay-simplifying microtransactions to a linear, non-continuous, non-competitive game to make it easier, observing " I might be more indignant if I thought this might actually work." He compared it to a bank robber walking into a bank with a gun and ski mask on, putting a bucket on the floor, then leaving after inviting people to just put money in the bucket of their own free will. Well he seemed to have been Tempting Fate again, as it turns out this style of microtransactions did in fact prove profitable enough to catch on and become a regular feature in gaming (in particular being a common mechanic in later Ubisoft open world games like the later Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games), in part because creators realized they could tune down naturally-gained rewards and resources to make the game grindier and incentivize players to crack open their wallets instead.
- His review of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 opens with a desire for Duke Nukem Forever to come out just so he could play a shooter which allowed you to carry more than two weapons at a time. And then DNF came out, and it turns out it didn't (though a patch was later released for the PC version that allowed you to carry four weapons at a time).
- Yahtzee had quite the longstanding thing going with DNF. Way, way back at the start of Zero Punctuation, he mentioned in his "appearance" at the 2007 Game Developer's Choice awards (a video that came out nearly four years before the game itself was released) that if DNF "doesn't turn out to be history's greatest contribution to human culture", he "and every other reviewer on Earth [was] going to saw its bollocks off." While his joke review described it as such a contribution, the real game got brutally, nearly universally panned when it did come out, including by Yahtzee himself.
- When his review of Yakuza 4 was about to go up, the 2011 Japan earthquake hit. Realizing that a lot of the video was about Japanese cultural quirks that he finds weird/creepy and that this trope would come back to bite him in the ass hard if left as-is, he quickly went into a bit of damage control and made sure the video started with a disclaimer about the recent events and how he would never wish ill will upon a people who he has always had his admiration and respect, and he hopes they'll forgive him for the savage mocking that was about to commence.
- In his review of the first Assassin's Creed, he praised it for trying something different in an increasingly homogenized industry, even if it wasn't perfect. Fast-forward to around 2015 and Yahtzee now views Assassin's Creed as one of the most Strictly Formula and uninspired franchises in existence. What's more, fast-forward to 2020 and Yahtzee has criticized the industry for essentially homogenizing into clones of Assassin's Creed: "open world stealth action games with crafting and collectibles"note .
- While reviewing Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag Yahtzee praised the game's sailing system, but stated he could not see any way it could be implemented in other periods. Come Origins and Odyssey, and Yahtzee ended up being annoyed at how Ubisoft was seemingly forcing in sailing systems simply because it was in Black Flag.
- At the end of his Freedom Planet review, he goes off about how ceasing expectations culminates in "President Trump". Come November 8th, Trump became the official 45th President of the United States, and Yahtzee himself would remark about how he was Tempting Fate in hindsight in his review of Ashen.
- His review of Anthem opened with a rather funny sequence where he portrayed the game as the result of poor Bioware being driven by the manic whims of publisher Electronic Arts, characterised as an indecisive and temperamental Manchild that demands Bioware make a copy of Destiny for it even though it's not what they're known for or experienced at making. After Jason Schrier's famous article
dropped in April 2019 it emerged that not only was the decision to make the game an open world online looter shooter one that Bioware had made themselves rather than being forced into it by Executive Meddling from EA, but during the game's overlong development the staff were actively forbidden from comparing the game to Destiny, which prevented them from using it as a point of reference to avoid making the same mistakes that Destiny had already made and corrected. - Yahtzee's recounting of the World of Warcraft "Corrupted Blood" incident is all about the eerie parallels between that event and the COVID-19/Coronavirus pandemic, in particular that both were made worse by people ignoring quarantines and/or deliberately spreading the disease to other people.
- In his "Top 5 of 2019" video he gave the Resident Evil 2 (Remake) 4th best of the year, but expressed concern than Capcom had already announced the Resident Evil 3 (Remake), questioning whether they were ultimately planning on remaking the much-despised Resident Evil 6, saying "That'd be like when Europe took another crack at the bubonic plague." And then the very next goddamn year...
- The High on Life review swiftly became awkward when Justin Roiland was faced with domestic violence charges mere days after the review went live on The Escapist. The Youtube upload ended up addressing this issue in a preamble:"The author wishes it to be known that this video was originally made and released *before* news broke that Justin Roiland had been charged with felony domestic violence. We are very much aware that the timing is awkward, and no amount of comments to that effect will make us more aware of that."
- In the E3 2019 video, Yahtzee jokes about how going to E3 has given him "hype disease" and that he needs to "get in quarantine before the infection spreads". The last words of the video? "All right! Lock it down! Containment breach!" Not only would E3 be cancelled the next year because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, but it would be cancelled again in 2022 and 2023 because of dwindling interest brought about by the aftermath of the pandemic. Though E3 was still on for 2021, Yahtzee didn't do a video on it, and the 2023 cancellation of E3 was believed to be the final nail in the coffin, meaning that the last words he would ever say in an E3 video review were almost hauntingly prophetic of how everything changed for the worse. This in turn makes his Extra Punctuation video on how he missed E3 much more tragic. And now, with the permanent shutdown of E3 in late 2023, Yahtzee's E3 2019 video proved to be the final E3 episode of ZP, and his EP video proves that he will miss E3 forever.
- His 2020 review of Google Stadia sees him complaining about the game library, saying "Right now there's just a limited selection of triple-A titles that everyone stopped talking about around the same time they stopped talking about Russia annexing the Ukraine", referring to Russia's 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Less than two years later in 2022, Russia launched a full on invasion of Ukraine, this time with the intention of annexing the entire country.
- Yahtzee's review of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum ended on an uncharacteristically sympathetic note for its creators, noting that the game's failure was the result of Daedalic Entertainment being put way over their head in an unfamiliar genre with an unfamiliar level of scope, expressing pity for the developers in their situation of failing to hold onto "a power far beyond [their] reach." This expression gets much sadder when in June 2023 — only a month after the game's release — Daedalic's time as a developer came to a close, with its entire development team being laid off.
- Over the course of Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee has repeatedly stated that the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise needs to be put to rest, due to its status as a Franchise Zombie. Almost prophetically, his review on Sonic Superstars ended up being the final Sonic episode of ZP ever (and only for subscribers until November 21, 2023, when the episode finally saw the light of day along with Spider-Man 2, also the final Spider-Man episode of ZP ever, and the swan song for the entire series).
