Source: Neil Mockford / Getty
Kanye West and Nintendo? Ex-Nintendo President Reggie Fils-Aimé detailed a discussion about a possible collaboration that took place.
Nintendo Life reports that in a recent Talking Games With Reggie and Harold podcast, Fils-Aimé detailed a meeting with the “free-thinking” rapper plus Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto at an E3 show several years ago. The former president and COO of Nintendo of America would eventually end up at West’s fashion business office where the rapper tried to sell him on a piece of video game content he was working on, and he ultimately told West that the idea of Nintendo working on a Kanye collaboration “just wasn’t there.”
Per Nintendo Life:
“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.”
Of course, West tried his best to convince Fils-Aimé that the collaboration needed to happen despite the Nintendo exec trying his best to tell Yeezy it wouldn’t be a good fit at the moment.
“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.’”
While the story doesn’t specifically mention it, West was working on a video game called Only One that was inspired by his mother Donda’s death and the Paul McCartney-assisted track of the same name.
West shared a trailer of the game, but it never saw the light of day. According to The Gamer, Encyclopedia Pictura, the film and animation studio that originally partnered with West on the game said we good back in 2019 and backed out of the deal.
Welp.
You can listen to the entire interview here.
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Photo: Neil Mockford / Getty
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