After working in Television for 12 years, Nich’s best work appears to come from an independent web series produced alongside alumni from the now-cancelled Australian gaming series “Good Game”.
When the ABC show The Roast was axed at the end of 2014, it’s host, Nich Richardson, had already made quite an impression with their executive producer.
“Janet Carr was our executive producer on the abc side and she was also the executive producer for good game”, Nich said to me on a discord call, beginning to recount how he became the host of the webshow Good Game: Pocket.
“She came over to the studio one day and we wrote the show in this, like, warehouse that we used as a studio, and the writer’s room was this big cavernous cement space that was horrible, so we were like ‘we should paint this’ so that it was friendly.”
“There was this little office in the middle of it like a block and that turned into my office, and one of the writers ended up going ‘Hey how about I paint this like a mario level?’, So the outside of that office looked exactly like Mario 1-1. So when Janet walked into the studio for the first time she was like ‘Whose office is that?’ I was like ‘yeah that’s me’,” He said.
“She asked, ‘Do you like video games?’ I was like ‘Yeah well look, I work in Mario 1-1’.”
Nich would go on to work on Good Game: Pocket for just under two years, before it too, was axed.
He has since worked in a multitude of gaming-related media for the ABC, Channel Seven, Riot Games, Playstation and more.
But of his most memorable pieces of work, a charity livestream that raised over $9,000 AUD for Afghanaid, was made as part of Back Pocket, a show produced by a company he founded with other Good Game alumni.
“When we did the Afghanaid one, we said ‘let’s set a realistic goal’ and I think the original goal was… I can’t remember pounds, but in Australian dollars it was a thousand,” Nich said.
“So we went, ‘let’s do a thousand dollars because we will definitely be able to raise that, and if we don’t, then I will just toss in five hundred bucks at the end of the stream’.”
“And then in twenty minutes, it had already gotten to like six thousand dollars, and so I think that we were staggered by that and I think that we also went ‘well, we’re donating as well, the community is donating to this, all this money is going to people who actually need it and it’s a much better use of people’s money than giving a twitch sub right now’.”
“So I think that doing more of that in the future, is 100 percent what we are going to be doing, we just need to find that line of, like, we don’t want it to feel like we’re always asking for money.”
Nich’s work with fellow Good Game alumni Stephanie Bendixson, Peter Burns, Gus Ronaldson and Will Yates on Back Pocket would not have been possible if Nich hadn’t moved to working on Good Game after The Roast’s cancellation.
“Getting canceled isn’t like a bad thing, every tv show gets canceled, at some point every single tv show will go ‘Well we’re done, we don’t have anymore’”, He said when he was asked about The Roast’s cancellation.
“The reason it happened for us is that there was these funding cuts and they were like ‘Well, it’s a bunch of twenty-two year olds, why the fuck should we give them anymore money when we pay Lee Sales to make The 7:30 Report’.”
Featured Image Source: Courtesy Of Lowkii Productions, Photographed by Jess Gleeson.
