Shirley Curry
Shirley Curry, “the Gaming Grandma,” announced Monday morning that she’s being made into a Skyrim companion character. A small team of developers is hard at work on “Shirley: A Skyrim Follower Mod,” for which Curry is recording all-new voice-over lines. Last year, Curry was the subject of a 27-minute documentary, along with a Change.org petition that led to Bethesda agreeing to make her an NPC in the upcoming Elder Scrolls VI. The 83-year-old Ohio grandmother has more than 770,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, and her gameplay videos have been seen nearly 15 million times.
“I spoke with her, and she gave both her permission and said she would help,” one of the mod’s creators said in a Reddit post. “We ended up writing a bunch of new lines, which Ms. Curry was gracious enough to record for us. I should emphasize that she is doing this for you. She really cares about her subscribers and anyone who enjoys her videos. After having a surprising amount of back-and-forth with her, I can honestly say that I’ve never met someone like her.”
Curry likes to invent characters, role-play, and tell her own original stories through games. “So many gamers, they start playing a game and their only objective is to rush through it as fast as they can get through it and get to whatever the goal is at the end. And I cannot play that way,” she told The Roanoke Times in 2016. “That would not be fun to me. And this is one of the things gamers have told me that they like. I’m glad, because that’s me, and I couldn’t change it.”
About five dedicated fans are collaborating on the mod, which should arrive on PC in “early 2020.” An Xbox version is also planned.
