Ryu Ga Gotoku studio, the developers of upcoming Yakuza prologue game Stranger than Heaven, are standing by their decision to resurrect Tupac Shakur as a character in the game. In an interview with IGN, studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama said, “We think it’s something that will add value to the game we’re making.”
In the interview, Yokoyama discussed how the team came to the decision to add the rapper who was shot and killed in 1996, nine years before the first Yakuza was released. The development team had first settled on casting Snoop Dogg as the smuggler Orpheus. Working with Snoop, they workshopped ideas for characters that might play well with Orpheus, and Snoop brought up Tupac as a potential character, an idea RGG was excited by and decided to pursue.
Yokoyama said the notion of reviving deceased characters for video games is more the norm in Japan than elsewhere, pointing toward RGG’s decision to use the likeness of Japanese actor Bunta Sugawara as one example. He also said they worked to get proper permissions from both Sugawara and Tupac’s estate and family. “We got their approval, we negotiated, and everybody was okay with it,” he said.
Yokoyama said he understood why there’s been so much backlash against Tupac’s reveal. He acknowledged that even when Sugawara’s character was announced, he received comments suggesting they should have let the dead rest. But he doesn’t seem to care about those comments. “Criticism is a freedom that people are free to have,” he said. “But this is something that we thought was a good idea.”