On Friday, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and Snoop Dogg made an appearance at Summer Game Fest to reveal that they had collaborated to give deceased hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur a cameo in the upcoming game Stranger Than Heaven, 30 years after Tupac’s murder. RGG and Snoop Dogg made it clear onstage and via a press release that this was not only done without the use of AI, but in collaboration with Tupac’s estate, as if that would make zombifying a deceased legend decades later acceptable.
But to add to how galling this all is, it turns out that Tupac’s “estate” that’s given the sign-off for this isn’t, like, his close family, as you might assume. No, it’s Tom Whalley, the former head of Warner Bros. Records who originally signed Tupac, and who is currently embroiled in a lawsuit brought by Tupac’s sister Sekyiwa Shakur in which she accuses Whalley of embezzling millions of dollars via her late brother’s estate.
Yikes!
Tupac Shakur died in 1996 without a will. Control of his (at the time) relatively small estate went to his mother, Afeni Shakur. Afeni Shakur set up a trust and named Whalley as its trustee, leaving control of the estate and ownership of Amaru Entertainment, which controls rights to much of the music Tupac wrote but didn’t release before his death, to Whalley when she died in 2016.
However, in 2022, Tupac’s sister Sekyiwa Shakur sued Whalley, accusing him of “blatant violations” of his duties as executor of the estate.
“He has effectively embezzled millions of dollars for his own benefit,” Sekyiwa Shakur wrote in the initial complaint. “Whalley has unreasonably enriched himself at the expense of the beneficiaries and in bad faith by taking excessive compensation in a position from which he should properly be barred based on the inherent conflict of interest.”
Just executing an estate doesn’t mean you own its contents, but Sekyiwa Shakur has accused Whalley of using his position to effectively pay himself. She says he hired himself as the manager of Amaru Entertainment, and at the time claimed he had received more than $5.5 million from that role. She also accused him of refusing to release personal property that was apparently left to Sekyiwa Shakur, instead using it for profit. And she claims that his estate, which is estimated to be worth at least $40 million, has not shared financial information with the non-profit Tupac Shakur Foundation, of which she is the president.
Whalley, for his part, has denied the allegations, saying that Afeni Shakur selected him for this role while he is alive and that he is executing it in everyone’s best interests. He also argues that the foundation isn’t entitled to the estate’s financial information in the first place. The lawsuit remains ongoing in 2026, though based on what we can see of its court records, it hasn’t made much progress in several years.
So in the meantime, we have Whalley, as executor of the estate, signing off on this posthumous appearance in Stranger Than Heaven and having previously collaborated on atrocities such as Tupac NFTs. And we also have Snoop Dogg involved, who seemingly will agree to have his likeness involved with anything at all. To be clear, we don’t really know how Sekyiwa Shakur or any other members of Tupac’s family feel about either his Stranger Than Heaven appearance or the NFTs or anything else, as it’s out of their hands entirely, which feels just a little bit weird even though I’m not sure any amount of approval from anyone could make the resurrection of someone like Tupac for the sake of profit and notoriety feel acceptable. We’ve reached out to RGG Studio for comment as to whether or not the family was consulted, and will update if we hear back.
