Kanye West (now known as Ye) is one of those celebrities who has a penchant for controversy and unpredictability. He crashed Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for her Best Female Video award at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, turned to gospel music, attempted to run for president with Elon Musk as his political adviser, harassed Pete Davidson on social media for dating his ex-wife kim kardashian after his divorce and, interestingly enough, he developed a video game. Her fashion company Yeezy Gap and Balenciaga launched a new mobile game to promote her new fashion line, much to the surprise of fans.
In this untitled game, you set your avatar’s skin tone and gender, select any outfit from the Yeezy Gap Balenciaga clothing line ranging from a jumpsuit to a Gap hoodie with boots, and soar through the sky, swinging your phone left and right to collect as many pigeons as you can to stay afloat without falling back to the post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s pretty straightforward, but remarkably strange. Not only does this game lack a title, but the mechanics are based on the premise of Only Onea previously unreleased game for iOS based on his song of the same name with Paul McCartney in which Kanye’s late mother, Donda West, ascends to heaven.
Tying this simple, post-apocalyptic mobile game to the latest fashion line might seem like a great marketing strategy in the eyes of its stakeholders, but in practice, it’s a disappointing culmination of Kanye’s long and bizarre saga through the games industry.
First gaming companies and Only One
Kanye initially wanted to develop video games rather than produce music in some way, shape, or form. According to GameRant, attempted to create a Mario-style game at the age of 12. The game’s content was sexual in nature, which would have surely drawn the ire of many parents in 1989. The game failed to see the light of day, but it managed to lead Kanye to discover his musical talents while composing the soundtrack for it.
Deep breakthrough in his successful music career. During an interview in The Breakfast Club of 105.1 FM in February 2015, Kanye announced that he was creating the video game Only One. Like the song from which she was named, the game was created to honor the memory of her mother, who died in 2007 of coronary artery disease and complications resulting from cosmetic surgery. Kanye explained that Only One it would be a linear game about guiding his mother to the gates of Heaven. The premise mirrors that of Journeyin the sense that only the player wanders through the clouds.
At E3 2015, Kanye approached Nintendo head Shigeru Miyamoto and then-Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé at the show and unveiled a prototype for Only One, which was set to a soundtrack that he directed. Former IGN reporter Zachary Ryan confirmed the story in a twitter thread, saying that Miyamoto described the game as very interesting and moving. Kanye asked to speak to Fils-Aimé about launching the game, and soon enough, they met at the office of Kanye’s fashion company. As fils-aimé explained on the podcast Talking Games With Reggie and Harold, told Kanye that Nintendo is a very strict video game company, and that it had so many game projects lined up at the time that a collaboration between Kanye and Nintendo was not feasible. Two weeks later, Kanye announced Only One at a Yeezy fashion show in New York.
The following year, Kanye showed the trailer for Only One at the Yeezy Season 3 fashion event, The Life of Pablo album listening party and at E3 2016. The trailer showed her mother flying through the sky on a white horse before gaining her angel wings to enter Heaven.
The production by Only One was being handled by Encyclopedia Pictura, a Los Angeles-based film and animation studio. The studio was made up of 14 staff members who worked on the game from late 2014 through the summer of 2016. The match never saw the light of day.
According to Business Insider (via thegamer), sources familiar with the project Only One they said in 2019 that the game hadn’t been in production since that summer because funding for it fell through. The Pictura Encyclopedia denied this claim with a statement that reads in part: “We have continuously worked on the project, through various stages of development, production, prototyping, redevelopment, more prototypes, then more production, before and after E3.” 2016». When TheGamer reached out to the studio for an update a short time later, he stated that he was no longer working on the game and said nothing further.
The trailer gave fans the impression that the production of Only One it was complete, or at least a strand of hair was close to completion. However, Encyclopedia Pictura explained in the design page from the game who abandoned the project even after completing the initial version and developing a prototype due to Kanye was hospitalized for exhaustionwhich led him to cancel the rest of his Saint Pablo tour.
“We completed a version that was never released, as Kanye wanted to expand the scope,” the studio said. “We built a prototype of this larger game, but after the events of November 2016, we parted ways with the project.”
Yeezy Gap resurrects Only One (kind of)
The mobile game launched by Yeezy Gap and Balenciaga is a kind of resurrection of Only One, complete with things like motion controls, camera orientation for the avatar, and the pigeon collection for flight maintenance. His concepts are right on the money, and the avatar’s rotation with the phone’s swinging motion into a superhero pose is reminiscent of a scene in his music video. run away where the phoenix girl flies back to the skies where she came from. The only thing missing is the angel wings that are necessary to stay aloft.
It’s an awkward app that straddles the line between gaming and elaborate hype, but it took fans by surprise considering the celebrity seemed to have given up on developing games in his spare time after the flop of Only One. However, this game is a product of his persistence to bring his video game ideas to the world at any cost, despite the fact that the gaming industry is seemingly impervious to celebrity influence. Despite being one of the biggest celebrities in the world, he wasn’t big enough to push Nintendo executives to release his game. Instead, she had to bypass the industry entirely to make it happen.
It’s hard to know if Only One crashed to Earth so this game could fly. Perhaps it’s meant to be a teaser for the game, testing the waters and gauging player interest in more Ye games. Either way, it’s nice to see the artist’s passion project come to fruition in some form, however disappointing.
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