Stranger Than Heaven has long been one of the most anticipated games on the horizon. After all, it’s a new action game from one of the preeminent action-game studios, Ryu Ga Gotoku, the developer behind the Like a Dragon/Yakuza franchise. However, during the Summer Game Fest 2026 Showcase, the game raised more than a few eyebrows when it revealed the cast. Among Snoop Dogg and several other known actors, the studio unveiled that Tupac Shakur, the legendary rapper who was murdered 30 years ago, would also be a part of the cast. I sat down with RGG Studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama to learn how the team is approaching its depiction of Tupac.
As with all great stories, it all started with Snoop Dogg. Inspired by Snoop Dogg’s real-life relationships, Yokoyama began brainstorming with his team how to play off of that concept for his character.
“Snoop Dogg plays the character Orpheus, who’s a pretty important character to the game,” Yokoyama says. “There’s actually a lot of characters who have a relationship to Snoop in the game that we haven’t announced. There’s a lot of people in this world who, in terms of Japan, are outsiders or foreigners or people who have come from another country. But why Tupac specifically would be that when we cast Snoop as Orpheus, we thought, ‘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. 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.”
RGG Studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama
The way Yokoyama describes it, Tupac’s name rose to the surface after bringing the idea to Snoop Dogg. “Initially, we talked to Snoop and we said, ‘We have this character, we need to fill this role. Who do you think would be a good role for that?” Yokoyama says. “Then, Tupac’s name came out from Snoop’s side, but it was kind of playing back and forth. It wasn’t just his name, it was a bunch of different people. There were even people at our studio who said, ‘Well, if Snoop Dogg and Tupac have this relationship in the game together, you’d probably cry about that because it’s so cool!’ There were definitely people on both sides who really appreciated the idea, but obviously that wasn’t possible to achieve, right? The next step for us was we had to talk to both his family and his estate and negotiated and got everyone’s approval, so once we were clear, we were able to move forward with it.”
When I bring up the ongoing battle between Tupac’s family and music executive Tom Whalley, who owns Tupac’s likeness rights, Yokoyama clarifies that he pursued approval from the likeness holder, as well as Tupac’s surviving family. “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,” Yokoyama says. “But at the same time, we wanted to not kind of recreate who Tupac was when he passed away. 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 not going into his past, but rather his potential future.”
Though this clarifies some of the questions people had, and the family’s inclusion in the approval process likely makes this a more palatable decision, the inclusion of Tupac Shakur 30 years after he was gunned down is sure to continue to be a controversial decision. Stranger Than Heaven arrives on January 15.
