Kanye West developing video game about his mother's entrance into heaven

Feb 23, 2015

Kanye West revealed that he is taking a childhood passion for making video games into his latest project: a video game commemorating his late mother, Donda West.

“So right now I’m working on a video game for ‘Only One,’” West said, speaking of the touching song that he and Paul McCartney collaborated on. “The idea is, it’s my mother going through the gates of heaven and you have to bring her to the highest gates of heaven by holding her to the light. We’ve been working on it for like six months.”

“Only One” featured the former Beatles star on the piano and represented, according to West, “a powerful message of hope and joy to his daughter” and a way to memorialize his mother.

Donda West died in 2007 from complications due to cosmetic surgery. She was 58 years old at the time and a former Chicago State University English professor.

Kanye West also noted that he had been working on video games since a very young age and divulged the details of his first attempt at game programming. “First beat I did was in seventh grade, on my computer,” he said. “I got into doing beats for the video games I used to try to make. My game was very sexual. The main character was, like, a giant penis. 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. You’d have to draw in and program every little step — it literally took me all night to do a step, ’cause the penis, y’know, had little feet and eyes.”