Hip-hop star Kanye West has been known to incorporate his love for his mother, the late Donda West, in many of his musical projects, but the rapper is now translating that same love into a new video game.
Kanye West’s famous wife, Kim Kardashian, has already used aspects of her life to launch a successful video game, and it seems like West will be embarking on the same mission.
During an interview with Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club, West revealed that he has been working for months on a video game based on his single “Only One.”
In the song, which features former Beatles star Paul McCartney, West pays tribute to his mother, who died in 2007, in what he says is a conversation between his mother and his daughter North West.
While he didn’t say much about what the game will entail, he did explain what the game’s premise would ultimately be.
“The idea is that it’s my mother going through the gates of heaven,” he said during the hourlong interview. “And you’ve got to bring her to the highest gate of heaven by holding her to the light.”
Outside of that short description and the fact that West said he will be designing the game himself, there aren’t many more details about the rapper’s gaming project.
While he did say he has been working on the project for about six months, he didn’t reveal how much work he had left on the game or hint at any set release date.
The announcement of the new video game comes as a surprise for some hip-hop fans, but West says he has always been an avid gamer and started designing games when he was still in grade school.
Back in 2009, he told Details magazine that the first beat he ever made was actually for one of the video games he was trying to design.
While this latest game has a holy theme with his mother in mind, his first video game idea had a completely different topic in mind — the kind of topic that one might expect from a young boy in middle school.
“The main character was, like, a giant penis,” he said. “It was like Mario Brothers, but the ghosts were, like, vaginas. Mind you, I’m 12 years old, and this is stuff 30-year-olds are programming.”
So while the concept was pretty juvenile, it actually took quite a bit of talent for a young Kanye to make any progress on the game.
“You’d have to draw in and program every little step — it literally look me all night to do a step, ‘cause the penis, y’know, had little feet and eyes,” he continued.
No word out yet on if West ever plans to go back and revisit the penis-themed video game idea.