Perhaps the most controversial announcement at Summer Game Fest this year was the inclusion of Tupac Shakur in Stranger Than Heaven, the new historically inspired game from Yakuza studio Ryu Ga Gotoku.
Stranger Than Heaven also features Snoop Dogg in a prominent role, but the digitally resurrected version of the iconic rapper quickly drew the ire of swathes of people around the internet. In an interview with Game Informer, RGG studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama suggested that the idea of including Shakur stemmed from lengthy conversations with Snoop Dogg.
“We have Snoop Dogg, he’s such an incredible person who has all these really interesting relationships in the real world as well. We wanted to bring on these people with relationships for a lot of different roles, and those are the kind of people who we were just talking about before,” says Yokoyama, “But we thought – and we discussed this with Snoop, as well – ‘What if we had a person who had a relationship in the game and outside of the game that maybe mirrors it in some sense’.”
Snoop Dogg’s side of the conversation suggested Shakur’s inclusion first, which then led RGG to seek permission from both his family and his estate. Whereas many musical artists’ estates are owned by the family, Shakur’s is actually owned by former record executive Tom Whalley. The rapper’s sister, Sekyiwa Shakur, launched legal action against Whalley in 2022, accusing the executive of having “effectively embezzled millions of dollars for his own benefit.” You may also recall some controversy when Tupac was resurrected at Coachella in 2012 during a Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre performance.
But it’s important to note that Tupac isn’t the only celebrity being brought back for Stranger Than Heaven. Before this week’s announcement, RGG had already shared that they’d be recreating beloved Japanese Bunta Sugawara, who passed away in 2014, for the game. Sugawara was one of the biggest icons of Yakuza films, and his family gave their consent for his likeness. But it’s easy to see why Tupac specifically would be a sticking point for people, due to the nature of his legacy and death.
Game Informer did point this out to Yokoyama, who said,
“Of course, we wanted to have the family involved in every step along the way to make sure this is respectful to his legacy and honors who he was. But at the same time, we wanted to not kind of recreate who Tupac was when he passed away,” he continued, “We wanted to try to envision who Tupac might be now, and we did this with the full approval step by step. Going through the family to make sure that everything met it. We wanted to say, ‘Okay, if he was still alive now, thirty years later, how would he act? How would he express himself in that way? That’s what we’re trying to [do], not going into his past, but rather his potential future.”
It seems like that statement is unlikely to change the minds of those who’ve criticized Tupac’s inclusion. But it seems equally unlikely that RGG will change anything at all about its approach to the topic.
