Eight asterisks. That was the extent of what Xbox CEO Asha Sharma revealed earlier this month, calling Bethesda’s upcoming RPG “The Elder Scrolls VI: ********” after sitting in on a live playthrough of the game.
On every other front she was effusive. The “scale and grandeur” of the game were “incredible,” Sharma said, and the story “even greater.” The subtitle, however, remained buried under punctuation.
That was all fans needed. The answer they arrived at had reportedly been hiding inside a completely different Bethesda release since 2023.
The number nobody was supposed to decode
Back in 2023, a Starfield player spotted an oddity in the character creation menu: an employee number shown on screen. Their claim was that these weren’t arbitrary digits at all, but a cipher.
The figure in question: 190514-2009140512. Break it into pairs, then match each pair to its spot in the alphabet — A is 1, B is 2, and onward from there.
The result is one word. “Sentinel,” according to the player.
Its letter count? Eight — exactly the number of asterisks Sharma used.
Bethesda changed the number, and that’s the tell
This is where the theory stops being a fun coincidence and starts warranting real attention. Combing through older footage, players discovered the number on that screen hadn’t always read the same way.
Between the 2022 gameplay reveal and the playable 2023 build, Bethesda replaced it. The digits are also the same for every player, which eliminates procedural generation as an explanation.
Someone picked those numbers deliberately.
A one-word reply from a former Bethesda writer
Enter Michael Kirkbride. A writer and artist whose credits include The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Kirkbride is about as authoritative on Elder Scrolls lore as anyone can be without a current Bethesda badge.
When a recent social media post proposed “Sentinel” as the word Sharma left out, Kirkbride answered in a single syllable: “yep.”
Assuming it’s accurate, it’s a neat piece of misdirection — a secret tucked in plain sight within an entirely separate game, sitting there for three years until somebody bothered to do the arithmetic.
The other thing that happened the day Sharma visited
The riddle doubles as a convenient distraction, too. On the very day Sharma dropped by for that playthrough, unionized Bethesda staff were protesting mass Xbox layoffs.
Waiting for her on the lawn outside the Bethesda offices was an enormous inflatable rat, ringed by small red flags — one planted for every ZeniMax employee who lost their job.
Bethesda workers had already spoken out earlier this year about the number of veteran developers let go, a large share of them from the RPG’s quality assurance team. That loss of experience, they argued, chipped away at confidence in what The Elder Scrolls 6 will ultimately become.
An official release date still doesn’t exist. Current expectations put the open-world fantasy title at 2028 at the earliest, leaving fans ample time to keep running menu screens through decoders.
For anyone unwilling to sit out that wait, Skyrim can be made to look like a modern game without dropping thousands on a GPU.