What do you do to kill time while waiting for a new game to be released? Post about it on the forums? Obsessively check for a release date? Play some other games that might scratch the same itch? Commit an unending stream of brutal murders in a different game?
If that last one sounds familiar then you might be Sidek, a Skyrim player who has been keeping busy by killing Nazeem in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim every single day until The Elder Scrolls 6 is released, and posting the videos on YouTube. Is it a gruesome hobby? Sure. Does Nazeem deserve it? Probably not. Is it a great pastime anyway? It absolutely is.
To refresh your memory, Nazeem is a smug Redguard resident of Whiterun who asks the player "Do you get to the Cloud District very often?" before answering his own question with "Oh, what am I saying, of course you don't." That insufferably snooty attitude over the years has turned Nazeem into a Naz-meme and he's now nearly universally despised among the Skyrim community—hence becoming a natural target for Sidek's murderous hobby.
Since 2021, Sidek has been posting a video of Nazeem being killed every single day, using pretty much every possible weapon and spell imaginable. Not just in Whiterun, either, but all over the world. Sometimes it's straightforward, like just knocking his head clean off, but other times its more creative, such as Fus-Ro-Dahing him into a lake filled with a suspicious amount of slaughterfish.
There were two important Elder Scrolls milestones this week: first, it's been six years since the 30 second TES6 trailer debuted back in 2018, which to date has been the only glimpse we've gotten of Bethesda's next Elder Scrolls RPG. The other milestone is that as of this week Sidek has killed Nazeem 999 times, and decided to celebrate by spawning up a mob of Nazeems for a Nazeem-only battle royale to accomplish video number 1,000. You can watch the carnage below.
The most amusing part of it to me is the subtitles during the fight, which is just the many Nazeems screaming in pain as they're hurt by all the other Nazeems. A few excerpts:
And so on. A final Nazeem does survive the fight and charges (rather foolishly) at Sidek, who thoughtfully de-aggros the Redguard with magic before summoning a spectral bound bow and shooting him in the back. Nazeem might have won the battle royale, but that's not a chicken dinner being served: it's just another humiliating death in a long, nightmarish chain of them.
If you thought Sidek might retire from the murder business after that video, you're kidding yourself. Today Nazeem's 1,001st death was posted, a rather unceremonious clonk between the shoulderblades with an ancient Nordic pickaxe—just moments after Nazeem walked past another Nazeem's corpse on the ground. Poor guy. Here's hoping Bethesda releases The Elder Scrolls 6 before Nazeem dies another thousand times.
