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Why Does Tupac Shakur’s Inclusion in Stranger Than Heaven Feel So Much Worse Than Other Posthumous Representations in Games?
- Taylor Rioux
- 3 minutes ago
- 7 min read
On September 13, 1996, musician, poet, actor, and activist Tupac Shakur was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. As one of the most prominent figures in American pop culture at the time of his death, the impact of Shakur’s passing was widespread, and the fact that his murderer was never confirmed or found added mystery surrounding the events before and after the shooting — a mystery that was immediately capitalized upon by thousands in an effort to make money for themselves.
In the wake of this tragedy, hundreds (if not thousands) of songs, albums, poems, books, and films have been released that prominently feature details about Shakur or contain references to him and his death. Posthumous albums featuring his work and voice, as well as collections of his private poems, were quickly disseminated, and untold numbers of memorabilia remain in circulation to this day.
Tupac Shakur was never given the courtesy of peace, even after death — a fact that remains just as true now as it was in the 1990’s.
Tupac Shakur's likeness as it appears in Stranger Than Heaven
On June 5, 2026, Summer Games Fest held its keynote presentation showcasing a large number of upcoming video game titles to be released in the coming months and years. Among those titles was Stranger Than Heaven, an action-adventure title about gangs in Japan developed by RGG Studio — the famed makers of the Like a Dragon (Yakuza) series. In their presentation, RGG revealed that Tupac Shakur’s likeness would be prominently featured in the game, despite being deceased for 30 years.
Of course, this is not the first time an actor or famous person has been posthumously puppeteered in this way. Actors like Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing saw their visage portrayed in Star Wars films after their demise, and even Bruce Lee was imagined as an advocate for Johnny Walker, despite abstaining from alcohol himself. Shakur’s likeness is not even the only one to be featured in a major video game this year, with legendary actor Toshiro Mifune’s likeness being used as the main character in Onimusha: Way of the Sword. So why does Shakur’s inclusion in Stranger Than Heaven feel so much worse?
I argue that it lies in several key areas: the nature of Shakur’s death and its relation to the subject matter of the game, legal battles over rights to Shakur’s estate, the fact that Shakur had no say in the matter, and the long history of the commodification of the black body post-death.
In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife, author Tonia Sutherland states,
“The use of digital technologies to reanimate the dead, understood here as a 'resurrection practice,' raises a complex set of sociocultural and ethical concerns, particularly around issues of spectacle, commodification, carcerality, and the Black body as souvenir and memory object. Closely related to notions of symbolic immortality and digital immortality practices (addressed in depth in chapter 5), digital resurrection is a modern phenomenon that uses a combination of innovative technologies, digital manipulations, and marketing appeal to construct a domain in which the deceased appear wholesale in new contexts as though alive today—and, in some cases, as though consciously aware of their own demise.”
As noted earlier, Stranger Than Heaven is about gang violence in Japan, but more than that, it is about how the protagonist goes on to found the Tojo Clan, the largest and most powerful gang within the Like a Dragon games. The fact that Shakur was himself a victim of the type of violence the Tojo clan goes on to perpetuate makes his inclusion in the Tojo’s founding chapter astonishingly distasteful. RGG Studio’s explanation of his inclusion and depiction is lacking as well, with them telling Game Informer, “Well, if Snoop Dogg and Tupac have this relationship in the game together, you'd probably cry about that because it's so cool!'”
Positioning Shakur’s specter as a mere tool to elicit emotion is one thing, but RGG Studio is aiming to go beyond a simple depiction of who Shakur was in life, stating within that same interview,
“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.’”
One problem with this approach comes in assuming to know how Shakur’s ideals or politics would present themselves today. He died 30 full years ago; it is impossible to know how his positions, demeanor, or appearance would have evolved. It is arrogant to assume such things, and RGG’s insistence on doing so is baffling. By utilizing Shakur’s likeness to voice their own ideas, they commodify him and reduce his inclusion to mere spectacle—a critique that echoes Sutherland’s observations.
But this isn't the first time Shakur’s countenance has been paraded in public, either. At Coachella in 2012, a digital recreation was placed onstage alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre to perform some of his songs. Sutherland describes it thusly:
“So too was Tupac Shakur, resurrected in hologram form from the dead, expected to perform: he was set to dancing, set to singing, set to play the role of a shucking-and-jiving, oil-slicked, shiny, brawny, Black body—forever enslaved by the fetishism of the white gaze (just as Michael Jackson was) to the rhythm of his own music.”
In the absence of Shakur himself, his estate controls the rights to his likeness. This is also true for every other person who has been brought back in this way, but there are key differences in how this has been handled among the various parties named earlier. For Fisher and Cushing, their inclusion was in a long-running series that they themselves had already been a part of in life. While they did not themselves agree to the appearances, there remains some level of continuity of point and purpose for the inclusion.
For Shakur, the Like a Dragon series is entirely foreign. He did not know of it, and the extent of what Shakur could have envisioned as the use of his likeness in perpetuity is beyond our knowledge. Further still, the executors of Tupac Shakur’s estate are not actually members of his family; it is controlled by former Warner Brothers record executive Tom Whalley. Whalley was left the estate by Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s Mother, but ongoing legal battles with Tupac’s remaining family color Whalley’s handling as less than stellar. So while RGG Studio claims they received approval from the family, RGG Studios finds themselves between parties looking to control what remains of Tupac Shakur’s legacy.
When all of this is considered, it becomes impossible to separate Shakur’s appearance in Stranger Than Heaven from the longstanding exploitation and commodification of black bodies throughout history. As noted in Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife, Harvard restricted access to and profited from images of slaves in compromised positions (though they have since relinquished ownership), entire industries and subcultures were built upon photographs of lynchings, and more recent tragedies like the murder of George Floyd have been subject to continual public viewing, all while being used by corporations for marketing ends. Violence against black people is continually dredged up for some other purpose, removing the humanity of those involved from the equation.
While I suspect few in the general populace understand or know about the history of this commodification, sentiment against Tupac Shakur’s inclusion has been comparatively large when stacked up against Toshiro Mifune’s likeness in Onimusha. There are likely a multitude of factors for this. First, RGG Studios' recent troubles should not be discounted when examining why backlash to Shakur’s incorporation has been met so loudly.
Once considered a studio that could do no wrong, RGG has had several missteps in recent memory that have turned many against it, such as the removal of trans-related quests and including an actor in its game who had been found guilty of sexual misconduct because he seems like a “creep”.
Second, the circumstances surrounding Mifune’s appearance are much less immediately recognizable as unsavory. His likeness is managed by the company he himself set up, Mifune Productions, and there are no ongoing concerns about its management. Additionally, the way he is used, as an actor portraying a role in a piece of media, does not aim to reveal some truth about Mifune as a person, past or present.
Finally, while Tupac Shakur died from gang violence and is now set to appear in a game about it, Mifune’s passing was unrelated to the material at hand. No violence had been brought upon Mifune, and the exploitative aspects ring differently when put against the history of photographic and commercial exploitation of violence against black people. Mifune was not cut down with a katana in the streets of Tokyo, only to then have his digital clone puppeteered in a game about human murders via katana.
Despite Mifune’s appearance being comparatively more agreeable, I argue against both. It is worth considering letting the dead rest; directing these dead bodies to express things to our liking feels ghoulish, especially when they deal with subjects so close to their own personal experiences. These methodologies are inherently exploitative, particularly when the deceased were never consulted in the first place.
Toshiro Mifune's likeness as it appears in Onimusha: Way of the Sword.
Such efforts to recreate the deceased in this way are distasteful in the same ways AI Companions wearing the skin of a dead loved ones are repugnant. There’s just something unnerving about taking the faces and histories of those who can no longer advocate for themselves and using them to our own perverse ends. It goes beyond simple memorialization. When companies like 2wai and the now-defunct Eternime compile replicas of our deceased loved ones, they are looking to monetize our pain, regurgitating their likeness to appeal to our longing for connection.
In Laura Parker’s New Yorker article How to Become Virtually Immortal, she writes
“For the time being, it seems that Eterni.me’s appeal is more philosophical than practical. “A hundred years down the track you might not only be able to talk to your mom who died a year ago, but to your grandmother who died when you were sixteen, and your great-grandmother who died before you was born,” Susan Bluck, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, said. “So it means that we could, in some way, forge relations with ancestors who lived and died well before our own lifetime.””
But these facsimiles are not the ones we cherish; they hold none of the hopes, dreams, skills, beliefs, or love in their hearts. The corporations that make these doppelgangers prey on and commodify those who cannot advocate for themselves, just as much as they prey on those who retain memory of the lost. They are simply replicas meant to extract capital from the living by donning the visage of the dead. And while Tupac Shakurs’s inclusion in Stranger Than Heaven is by no means the first or most prominent digital recreation of a deceased person, its connections to historical black exploitation and closeness to the circumstances surrounding his death carry their own weight in its reception.