After being introduced to Minecraft by her grandchildren, Sue Jacquot from Arizona has found success as a YouTuber.
Back in October, Sue Jacquot, an 81-year-old grandma who lives in Arizona, set up a YouTube channel to upload her Minecraft gameplay videos.
Naming the channel GrammaCrackers, she had one goal in mind: to raise money – both through YouTube revenue and donations – to help cover the medical bills for her 17-year-old grandson Jack, who had been diagnosed with cancer.
You need at least 1,000 subscribers in order to monetise your YouTube channel, but in just a month, she had 100,000 of them. And after just a few more months of support, she’s thrilled to share that her grandson is now cancer free.
News station ABC15 recently spoke with Jacquot and her family, where she explains how she was introduced to Minecraft through her two grandsons, Jack and Austin, last summer.
‘I was never really curious about it but when you have grandkids who come to you and want to interact with you, you do it,’ she says, with Austin admitting he was ‘mind-blown’ at how quickly she took to it.
After a couple of months, Jacquot set up the YouTube channel, uploading a 15-minute video in October titled ‘The Best Start Ever in Minecraft,’ with a link to a GoFundMe page and a pledge that all revenue generated would go to her grandson’s medical bills.
It’s safe to say she yielded results as her first video has since accrued over half a million views and subsequent uploads have been averaging tens or hundreds of thousands of views.
At time of writing, she has over 221,000 subscribers and the GoFundMe page has received over $43,500 (about £32,450) in donations. ‘It was surreal,’ says Austin, ‘There was donations anywhere between, like, a dollar all the way up to $5,000.’
Jacquot is clearly touched by the support and generosity she’s received from her audience: ‘It’s the most incredible thing.’ And best of all, Jack says he is now cancer free and ‘feeling great.’
Jack was diagnosed with a type of sarcoma cancer, which starts in bones and soft tissue, in 2024, which meant a lot of overnight hospital stays. ‘It was not easy at all. I had, like… like 200 chemos over the course of a year.’
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While Jacquot never could have imagined she’d become a gamer or content creator, more elderly people enjoy video games than some may realise. Plus, the internet loves itself a gamer grandma. Just last month, a 92-year-old grandma went viral after winning a Tekken 8 tournament.
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Perhaps the most famous example is Shirely Currey, who used to specialise in making YouTube videos about The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, earning her the nickname Skyrim Grandma.
Despite plans to retire from YouTube in 2024, she soon bounced back but while she’s still active, she has since stopped making Skyrim videos.
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