Kanye West once set his eyes on the gaming sphere. In a recent Talking Games With Reggie & Harold podcast it was revealed that at E3 2016, Ye was found wandering the halls like a lost lamb.
In 2016 Kanye West was scooped up by Nintendo’s creative kingpin Shigeru Miyamoto and subsequently organised a meeting with Reggie Fils-Aime, the then-president of Nintendo. Kanye has always been a polarising person, but the ability to meet major players of multi-national conglomerates at no notice is one that demands respect.
In the meeting there was a back and forth about what they both needed and could offer each other. Nintendo were stretched thin, tried to offer what they could, but were well aware that there wasn’t a whole lot that could work. Ye had ideas for game called Only One about his late mother riding a winged horse to heaven.
Talking about the experience on his podcast, Reggie shared:
“Part of it was talking about what he was up to. He was experimenting with a piece of video game content; he wanted reactions to it. He comes out and says, ‘I want to work with Nintendo.’”
“We had so many different projects at Nintendo going on, the possibility of doing something with Kanye just wasn’t there, and so I had to find a way to politely decline this opportunity to work with him. I told him, ‘Kanye, you don’t want to work with us because we’re tough, we’re hard. All we do is push for the very best content. We would not be the type of partner you would want to work with.’ And he looks at me and says, ‘Reggie, you’re exactly the type of partner I want because of that reason!’ It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh.’”
Damn. While it seems improbable for anything to have occurred from this meeting, at least they didn’t Runaway.
In the end though, West did actually end up making a video game without any involvement from Nintendo. Check out some footage from Only One below.
