Brian Crecente is a video game journalist and syndicated columnist based in Denver, Colorado. Editor in chief of and writer for video gaming blog Kotaku, Crecente also writes Well Played, a weekly gaming column, for McClatchy-Tribune News Service.

Prior to becoming a full-time gaming journalist, Crecente was an award-winning police reporter for 12 years at major dailies around the country where he covered everything from wild fires and daily crime to the contested presidential election and serial killers.

Crecente has written about video games for the past nine years. His work has appeared in Playboy Magazine, Paste, Variety, Stuff, Wired and MSNBC, as well as several U.S. newspapers and publications in the UK and Portugal. He has also appeared on national TV and radio and has been quoted in newspapers both in the U.S. and abroad.

Crecente was named one of the 20 most influential people in the video game industry over the past 20 years by GamePro in 2009 and one of gaming's Top 50 journalists by Edge in 2006. He also sits as a judge on several national and international video game award panels and frequently attends conferences in Europe, Asia and the U.S.

Crecente holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Maryland - College Park. Crecente lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife and son.

With a team of writers located throughout the U.S. and in Japan and Australia, Kotaku currently has about 3.5 million readers who view more than 50 million pages a month.

Send an email to the author of this post at editor@kotaku.com.