Move over Shirley Curry, the Grand Theft Auto community may have just found everyone's newest favorite nan.
As shared by her grandson on Reddit, her grandmother bought a brand-new Xbox Series X for one reason, and it is the same reason a few million other people are counting down to November.
The story goes that they went to their grandmother's place to sort out her Wi-Fi and spotted an Xbox Series X sitting under the television. When they asked why a 78-year-old had a current-generation console, she told them there was a new game coming in November that she wanted to play, and, no, it isn't the rumored Legend of Zelda remake.
Apparently, she'd known about Grand Theft Auto 6 for a while and bought the hardware months ahead so she'd be ready to jump into Vice City and Leonida.
Naturally, the thread did what these threads do and turned her into a folk hero. People called her the coolest grandma in history while other older players chimed in with their own plans, one 66-year-old torn between this and going back to Call of Duty, a 61-year-old calling it "just the new norm," someone joking they would be doing the exact same thing at that age unless dementia got there first, and another claiming to be 96-years-old and hoping they'd still be around to play the next Grand Theft Auto. A few even shared memories of playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas with a grandparent who mostly wanted to fly jets and blow up cars, which, honestly, is the correct way to play a GTA game.
There was the usual sprinkle of people calling the whole thing made up, since an unverifiable Reddit anecdote about someone's nan is exactly the sort of thing that gets invented for upvotes. We cannot prove it happened, but it isn't impossible.
At 78 now, she would have been in her late forties when the very first GTA came out in 1997. She is not necessarily some newcomer who saw a headline. She could have been following this series, on and off, for years, all without her grandson knowing. The image of a bewildered grandmother stumbling into gaming is probably wrong. She might just be a lifelong fan who has waited for GTA 6 for years, same as everyone else.
This is the actual story here. GTA 6 is no longer just a game. It's become a cultural event capable of reaching people who do not own a console and have no other reason to buy one. When a game convinces a 78-year-old to go out and purchase a piece of hardware specifically for it, even one that just went on a massive price hike, that is the same cultural gravity pulling in celebrities and footballers, just at the other end of the age range.
Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick just told investors the audience for this thing is bigger than anyone realizes. A grandmother with a fresh Xbox and a November plan is a very real example of that.
