Annons
But we can work some things out, based on what's been said, and the little we've seen of Only One.The game's about his mum. When Donda West died in 2007, it hit her son hard. She'd nurtured his nascent talent by paying for recording time when he was in his early teens, and ultimately backed his dropping out of college to concentrate on a music career: "Some career goals don't require college." At MSG, Kanye revealed Only One by saying, "I worked on a video game and I wanted to show y'all… [It's based on] the idea of my mom travelling through the gates of heaven."So it's more specifically about his mum being dead. And ascending to heaven, which either does or doesn't exist depending on that feeling inside your chest. You know the one. It's there, or it's not. Kanye feels it, and he's super proud of Only One, announcing to the MSG crowd once the trailer had ended: "That's not easy to do, man. Y'all be acting like that shit is regular." Kanye is right: making video games is not easy.Not that we know just how much of his own time Kanye committed to Only One. Obviously.But we do know that Kanye had a hard time convincing games-making people to take his idea seriously. He continued, as reported by Kotaku: "I go out and meet with everybody in San Fran, and they'll diss the fuck out of me. And I'll be like, 'I wanna make a game,' and they'll be like, 'FUCK YOU.' That was hard to do, bro!"
Annons
Imagine being that someone at a games studio, or maybe several people at several studios, responsible for telling Kanye West to take his game idea and stick it up his arse. Except, he stays away from that area all together, of course. He's really not into buttholes.We've known he's been making a game for a while, so colour us completely unsurprised by this whole thing. VICE was on top of Kanye's plans in the interactive entertainment field a year ago, when we wrote that his video game "might just be amazing". We also said, back in February 2015, that his heavenly game could well share some qualities with Ignition Tokyo's 2011 action release, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. And you have to say that the visuals of the trailer aren't so far away from that older game's awesome looks. Then again, Only One also looks a little like Robot Unicorn Attack 2. Doesn't it?On Noisey: Watch Kanye West Freestyle on Tim Westwood's Show in 2004