Daniel Hardcastle

Daniel John Hardcastle, commonly known by his online alias Nerd³, NerdCubed, or sometimes Forsinain42, is a British gaming commentator, comedian, and comic writer. As of January 2014 he has produced over 700 videos and has over 1.5 million subscribers to his primary YouTube channel, OfficialNerdCubed.

Career

Hardcastle started his career through the creation of a 384-long series of webcomics, based around the highly popular Minecraft game. An iOS app was created for the comic by Movura Labs to help it reach a wider audience.^[1] After moving on to producing "Let's Play" Minecraft videos, he was approached by Machinima.com who hired him to direct their 13 Ways to Die series of videos.^[2] He then went on to produce videos covering various other games at fan request. He has now gained a large enough following that Mike Bithell, developer of successful Indie game Thomas Was Alone, attributes the success of his game to a number of Let's Players, Hardcastle included.^[3][4][5] His review of indie game Race the Sun contributed to its success on Steam Greenlight.^[6] As of December 2013 the OfficialNerdCubed channel has over 1.5 million subscribers and over 300 million video views, making it one of the top 500 channels on YouTube.^[7][8]

In September 2013, Hardcastle conducted an interview with Stephen Moffat on his second channel, "OfficiallyNerdCubed", in which he discussed details about the upcoming eighth series of Doctor Who and various aspects of Doctor Who lore in general.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Hardcastle has collaborated with a number of other Youtubers, including Hannah Hart, Emma Blackery, and Martyn Littlewood of The Yogscast. His theme song was written and composed by English rapper Dan Bull^[13] .

In November 2013 Hardcastle, along with a number of other Youtubers,^[14] turned off the comments section for both of his channels as a result of the Google+ integration and the problems it caused.^[15]

On 12 December 2013, Hardcastle's website was relaunched after a long period of being unavailable. Hardcastle stated in an earlier video that this not only acted as a hub for his videos, but as a possible "backup plan" if anything were to happen to YouTube, the site that currently hosts all of Hardcastle's videos. Shortly after this, Hardcastle announced a reboot of his channel.^[16]

Personal life

Hardcastle left school early to study astrophysics at university but didn't finish the first year.^[17] He currently lives in London.

Hardcastle suffers from the disease infectious mononucleosis, which has affected the way Hardcastle has run his channel.^[16] This led to him contracting myalgic encephalomyelitis, which means he is often unable to work due to symptoms such as aggregating pain.^[16]

Parents

In celebration of 100,000 subscribers on the main channel in August 2012, Hardcastle uploaded a special "Nerd³'s PARENTS Play..." video featuring his mother and father, Andrine and Steve Hardcastle playing London 2012, Spore, Bully and Farming Simulator 2011.^[18] In January 2013, Hardcastle started a full-time series with his father titled "Father and Son-Days" in which they played co-op games together.^[19] Following the success of this, Hardcastle asked on a Reddit post if there was interest in Steve running his own channel, Dad³.^[20] To which the reaction was positive. The OfficialDadCubed channel was created in March 2013 and gained 65,000 subscribers before the first video was uploaded in April.^[21] The channel now has over 270,000 subscribers as of February 2014.^[22]

References

External links

• Official website