Shirley Curry is an 84-year-old grandma from Ohio who loves to play games and record them on her YouTube channel with eight hundred and fourteen thousand followers. Yes, you heard right she has 814 thousand followers. Now if you are interested, here is an article where you can learn and find out more about this great lady.

The beginnings of Grandma Shirley

At first Shirley watch just watching videos of her favorite gamers and she would always leave a comment saying she liked their video, and they would comment back to her. People eventually realized that she had a channel and they’d come to look at it and subscribe, even though she wasn’t doing anything in it. She had never made a video or a vlog or something.

When she started to record for the first time, she had about two hundred and fifty subscribers. She said, “The first video I uploaded was because the handful of subscribers I had at the time kept at me and kept at me to record my own gameplay.” After she record her first video, she just went to bed and didn’t think about it anymore.

But somebody took her video, put it on Reddit and it went viral. So, the next morning when she opened her email, there were thousands of emails on there. She didn’t know what it was but when she started reading them, she realized they were comments from the video. “Most of the comments were nice, but those first few weeks, I got a lot of nasty comments. So, I learned to answer them politely like a grandmother would say something to a child that didn’t have any brains, and eventually they learned to treat a grandmother with respect,” Shirley said about the comments.

Shirley’s first game and Skyrim

She started playing games because back in 2014 her son gave her a computer and also a game, Civilization II. At that time people still had games on disks instead of online. She played that game for years, day and night. “Before I got Cv II, I didn’t even know anything about playing games. I didn’t know that existed,” she said.

Later she got introduced to Skyrim by her son because he thought she would like it. And he was right. When she saw the game, she tough, “Oh my god, this is a totally different world.” And then Civ became like a top-down board game to her. She fell in love with Skyrim, she loved everything about it. “I used to go camping when we lived in California and we would go gold panning. And we would go, like, four times a year, and I loved wandering around in the wood with our dogs, and I do feel like that in Skyrim,” she said. She takes her time in a game because it is like telling a story. She doesn't like to just follow the game the way it's developed and go from quest to quest and try to get to the end of the game. In her opinion, you can't beat the game, because there are so many different characters to play, so many different ways to play each one and so many stories that you can't ever get through with it.

Why grandma and grandkids

Way back when she had about three hundred subscribers, they started to call her grandma and she said that it had been just natural when she had started recording to say, “Hi grandkids!” She also mentioned she likes that they call her grandma.

Different than most of others

”I think people like my channel so much because it is different than most of them. Most of them, they run through the gameplay real fast, instead of enjoying of Skyrim or any other game that they are in,” Shirley said. She also doesn’t use vulgar language and she doesn’t cuss in videos, so the parents of the kids who are watch her videos on You Tube like that.

Life outside the You Tube channel

Shirley is a widow and she has 4 sons, 9 grandchildren, and 3 great-grandchildren. They all think it is pretty cool that she plays games and has a channel.

She belongs to a quilting guild where she goes to a meeting once a month and she belongs to a quilting bee - a small group of ladies who meet in one another's house twice a month. She doesn't talk to the ladies about gaming because they don't know anything about it and don't want to know anything about it. But her closest friend does like the fact that she is a gamer. “My closest friend, she is more thrilled about it, I think, than the others, and whenever we are anywhere, anywhere, she will makes sure she brings the conversation around to the fact that I am a gamer, and I get so embarrassed sometimes,” she said.

She really likes to go to conventions because she thinks it is really fun and she likes it when people recognize her as Grandma Shirley. She is excited to meet other gamers and different developers there

Sometimes it gets tiring

“I do often feel like doing this YouTube business gets tiring. But it gets tiring because I can't do what I want to. I can't play as long as I want to, or I can't go read if I want to, because it takes up a lot of my time responding to people,” she said.  

She sometimes feels like she gets backed in a corner because she hears some really bad stuff from kids, and she feels so sorry for them. Their home life, their depression, which is so rampant among young people. She is always getting comments like, "I have been so depressed, and I watched your video and it made me feel so much better." Some of the comments were suicidal. “I have talked to so many young people, and then I think, what if I wasn’t there?” Shirley said. So, when she gets tired of doing this and she feels like she wants to quit, she thinks of these kids, and tells herself, "I can't." So, that’s what keeps her going.