Credit: Dangerous Minds / Phenix

Believe it or not, there was a period of time when Kanye West was generally considered one of the good guys.

Obviously, the man had an ego that Louis XIV would call “a little much” even back then. However, he was still the man who called out George W Bush’s racism on national television. He was still the man broadening the scope of mainstream hip-hop. Most of all, he was still the man who made The College Dropout, Late Registration and Graduation. He was one of the great minds of hip-hop who, at least then, you could forgive a few dumb statements from in the same way we allowed dumb statements from David Bowie and Noel Gallagher.

Even by 2013, when, in retrospect, there were some really worrying signs about his mental health beginning to show, he was still as beloved as anyone in music. So much so that Adelaide-based musician and artist Clara Hope took to RPG Maker under the name Phenix to make Kanye Quest 3030, a video game where you take control of the ‘Diamonds of Sierra Leone’ megastar and go on a mystical quest to save the world. A mystical quest that one can’t help but cringe about in hindsight.

After all, in 2026, we have now had a full decade of Ye’s descent into full-on fascism. Beginning with rants about how he didn’t vote in the 2016 election, but if he did, he’d have voted for Donald Trump. Moving on to being a full-on, card-carrying, red hat toting MAGA stan running for president. Finally, he evolved into what everyone who believes in MAGA really is underneath all the America-First bluster, a Nazi. Which makes the premise of Kanye Quest 3030 incredibly ironic.

Because it’s about a rapper becoming the leader of the United States of America, claiming to be a God and running it as a theocratic dictatorship. Shockingly enough, that rapper isn’t Kanye West.

But what is ‘Kanye Quest 3030’?

So, the game begins in 2010. Kanye West takes out his garbage and, presumably because he isn’t used to doing that himself anymore (just like longtime rival 50 Cent), he trips and falls. Except he doesn’t hit the pavement, he falls through a portal that takes him to the year 3030, where everything is deeply strange, and a rapper is the God-Emperor of the United States of America. Namely, and brace yourself for a name you won’t have heard in a loooong time, fellow millennials, the leader of the free world is in fact the BasedGod himself, Lil B.

Presumably because no rapper gets to be a tyrannical, dictatorial maniac but him, the artist currently known as Ye sets off to overthrow Lil B’s regime and, in doing so, discovers that several other rappers are here as well. Thus, the gameplay reveals itself properly to be, essentially, Pokémon with rappers. Ye is battling other rappers like LL Cool J, Eminem and fellow MAGA grifter Nicki Minaj and teaming up with “kindred spirits” like MF DOOM and RZA.

The whole thing is a bit of silly fun, barely taking an hour to complete, and when you’ve overthrown Lil B, it’s revealed that the whole thing was a hallucination brought on by Ye tripping while taking out the garbage and hitting his head on the pavement. One wonders how Hope feels about her legacy being an entire RPG she made about someone who, at least until recently, it seems, felt like he was not going to be the hero of a story about a tyrannical dictator who thinks he’s a god, but the villain of the piece instead.