Our friends at VICE just unveiled the next online gaming sensation, and she’s the badass grandmother you never had. Meet Shirley Curry, who is known by her 115,000+ YouTube channel subscribers as ‘Gamer Grandma’. Shirley’s been around for a while, like 79 years. Just think what it must feel like for her to enjoy the fruits of ‘Skyrim’ after having grown up alongside the introduction of the world’s first video game, ‘Pong.’ Mind-bottling, right? Shirley, or ‘Gamer Grandma’ struck instant success after sharing her first ‘Skyrim’ gameplay episode. She rose the morning after uploading her homemade 15 minutes of viral gaming gold, to find over 11,000 emails in her inbox. I hope the poor old lass was in her rocking chair with a kettle on for some English Breakfast Tea when she went on to inevitably realize she’d made herself something of an online sensation. Dudes left and right are losing their minds, and Grandma Curry needs get a spot on Kimmel or Ellen.
Shirley Curry is teetering on the brink of internet-bred stardom. In her first episode and with a slight southern drawl Curry shares with her viewers that what she enjoys most in the game is, “traveling across the country, exploring caves, fighting, looting, and killing things.” That’s her preference. Straight up. And let me tell you, Shirley’s post-bandit kill to chuckle at 3:18 is viral gaming gold. She is amped dude. She’s also a shining testament, a hope for change if you will, to the lazy tapioca pudding-lined bags of bones out there that sit around all day reading the latest from the Nicholas Sparks/Nora Roberts mindless puppy-eyed romance factory.
At certain points throughout this 15-minutes you feel like you’re back, reunited with your grandma, grammy, gram-grams, (there are literally too many variations on grandma to even deal with) but she’s a battle-weathered, Daedric armor-clad, Dragonbane sword-swinging badass who drinks her sherry from out a silver-lined tankard.