Eight asterisks. That’s all Xbox CEO Asha Sharma gave up earlier this month when she referred to Bethesda’s next RPG as “The Elder Scrolls VI: ********” after watching a live playthrough of the game.
She was generous about everything else. Sharma said the game’s “scale and grandeur” were “incredible” and that the story was “even greater.” The title itself, though, stayed behind a wall of punctuation.
Fans got to work. And the answer they landed on had reportedly been sitting in a different Bethesda game since 2023.
The number nobody was supposed to decode
Three years ago, a Starfield player noticed something in the character creation menu: an employee number displayed on screen. Not a random string of digits, they argued, but a cipher.
The number was 190514-2009140512. Split it into pairs, then swap each pair for its position in the alphabet. A equals 1, B equals 2, and so on down the line.
What comes out the other end is a single word. “Sentinel,” the player declared.
Count the letters. Eight. Same as Sharma’s asterisks.
Bethesda changed the number, and that’s the tell
Here’s the part that moves this from cute coincidence to something worth taking seriously. Players dug into older footage and found that the number on that screen wasn’t always the same.
Bethesda swapped it out between the 2022 gameplay reveal and the playable 2023 version. It’s also identical for every single player, which rules out procedural noise.
Somebody chose those digits on purpose.
A one-word reply from a former Bethesda writer
Then Michael Kirkbride showed up. Kirkbride is a writer and artist who worked on The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, which makes him roughly as close to a credible source on Elder Scrolls arcana as a person can be without currently holding a Bethesda badge.
A recent social media post guessed that “Sentinel” was Sharma’s omitted word. Kirkbride replied with one syllable: “yep.”
If it holds up, it’s a good trick. A secret hidden in plain sight inside a completely different game, waiting three years for someone to check the math.
The other thing that happened the day Sharma visited
The puzzle also happens to be a useful distraction. Bethesda union workers protested mass Xbox layoffs on the same day Sharma came by to watch that playthrough.
She was greeted by a giant inflatable rat on the lawn outside the Bethesda offices. Around it sat small red flags, one for each laid-off ZeniMax worker.
Earlier this year, Bethesda workers raised concerns about how many veteran developers had been cut, much of it from the RPG’s quality assurance team. They said losing that experience undermined confidence in what The Elder Scrolls 6 will actually be.
There’s still no official release date. The open-world fantasy game is expected in 2028 or later, which gives everyone plenty of time to keep decoding menu screens.
And if you’re not willing to wait that long, Skyrim can be made to look like a modern game without spending thousands on a GPU.
