Kanye West Wanted to Work With Nintendo, Reggie Reveals

Theres a lot of strange folks in the media industry. But one of the more well known examples is Kanye West. From music super production to political controversy, West has a history. And as it turns out, some of that history was working with Nintendo on a video game.

According to a report by NintendoEverything, the former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime revealed a past collaboration with West that never saw fruition.

Reggie told the story on the Talking Games with Reggie & Harold Podcast, an audio show produced earlier in the year to raise donations for the New York Video Game Critics Circle. Those that donated were given access to the shows bonus content.

According to Reggie, Kanye West visited Nintendo's area during E3 a number of years ago. He even managed to spend some time with Shigeru Miyamoto. West wanted to meet with Reggie as well, managing to organize a meet up at his fashion business office in Calabasas. West wanted to work together on a video game, but Nintendo wasnt able to find the time and resources to do so.

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 wasnt there, and so I had to find a way to politely decline this opportunity to work with him. I told him, Kanye, you dont want to work with us because were tough, were 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, youre exactly the type of partner I want because of that reason! Its like, Oh my gosh.'

Kim Kardashian, Wests wife and fellow celebrity, as confirmed to have been at the meeting as well. While they didnt come to an agreement, Nintendo had remarked that Kanye has such a passion for the video game space, and hes a creator.

Reggie is absolutely right about this, too. Nintendo strives for high quality content. Wed be very interested to see what would have come had the two actually collaborated.
 
The running assumption is that the game in question is the same one West revealed in 2016. Titled "Only One", it had the player explore the heavens as Donda West, Kanye's late mother. Only One was originally intended as an iOS mobile game, though it never finished production.