Shirley Curry isn’t like most video game YouTube creators. She primarily focuses on only one game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, choosing to ignore most new releases in favor of the 7-year-old RPG. She intersperses travel videos among her gaming content. And most importantly, she’s 82 years old. Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls VI was announced at E3 but is likely several years away, and fearing that she won’t be around to see the sequel when it releases, fans are asking Bethesda to include Curry as a character instead.
After a Reddit user spotted a video comment Curry — known online as Grandma Shirley — had left expressing her doubts at living to see The Elder Scrolls VI, a petition was created on Change.org to have her immortalized in the game.
The petition asked for her to be added to the game as either a character, item, or location, but we think it would be a wasted opportunity to not have her as a character. Curry opens all of her videos by welcoming her “grandkids,” and she doesn’t play the games the way most people do. Though she does quests, Curry prefers to act as a traveling merchant in her games, selling the treasure she discovers as she explores, and she sinks countless hours into them.
“As Bethesda has demonstrated with another fan named Erik West, they are willing to include dedicated fans of their series into their games,” the petition added.
West had been included in Skyrim as the character “Erik the Slayer,” and died of cancer several months before the game’s official release. Bethesda has granted wishes for fans in the past, giving a young cancer patient named Wes the chance to play Fallout 76 before it launched. Wes unfortunately passed away a few weeks before the game came out.
Before the released of The Elder Scrolls VI, Bethesda Game Studios will develop the science-fiction game Starfield. Very little is known about either title, but it’s expected that they will not release on the current generation of systems. In the meantime, Curry can keep playing Skyrim on just about every platform imaginable, though she prefers her tried-and-true PC.