Kanye West: Game Designer?

Just when I finally thought the “Anything you can do, I can do better” rivalry between hip-hop artists 50 Cent and Kanye West had finally faded away, it moves to a new battleground … video games. We all know that Fiddy has already broken into the industry with 2005’s 50 Cent: Bulletproof on the PS2 and Xbox. Plus, in a move that left many gamers asking simply “Why?”, 50 Cent is returning to the current generation of consoles with the upcoming release of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. While Fiddy is making his mark starring in video games, Kanye West claims that he’s done one better by designing and programming his own video game … all at the tender age of 12.

In a recent interview with Details magazine, West was discussing his start in the music industry. The self-proclaimed “voice of this generation” claims that his first music beats were actually a part of a video game project he was working on as a kid. His game? Well, let’s just say it’s enough to make the folks at Rockstar blush.

According to West, “First beat I did was in seventh grade, on my computer. 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.”

Hmm … last time I checked, there weren’t ghosts in the original Mario Brothers. Boos didn’t show up until Super Mario Bros. 3, and definitely never looked anything like vaginas. But I digress …

Naturally, West was humble about his work, continue on with, “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.”

The strangest thing about this story? If Kanye’s game ever HAD made it into production, it probably still would have earned higher critical scores that 50 Cent: Bulletproof. Thankfully, though, West chose instead to drop his budding game design career and channel his talent into music. After all, he wouldn’t want to be responsible for single-handedly sending all those 30-year-old programmers and designers to the unemployment line.