Kanye Quest 3030: A Cult Recruiting Tool?

The first video game I tried to make when I was a kid was an RPG, as they were my favourite games at the time. It was a daunting task, and I was not up for it. I didn’t want this to be some pathetic text-based adventure like the popular “Zork”, either; I was going full ASCII art on this bitch.

The reality was, I just didn’t have the tools available to do it. Here I was, trying to create an entire virtual world, and I didn’t even know how to program using functions yet. Can you imagine?

Ah, the whimsy of youth. As time went on, I eventually lost interest in this project. The more I understood about programming, the more I realized what a massive undertaking I had been trying to accomplish.

That wouldn’t necessarily have been enough to stop me, but technology was progressing as well. Sure, now I had the tools and knowledge at my disposal to finish what I started as a child, but this was the 1990’s! That ASCII or text based shit just wasn’t going to fly anymore.

I would’ve needed some high quality 16-bit graphics for my game to hold anyone’s attention, and I had no idea to do that. Eventually, I lost interest in the idea. I never had some huge plan or great artistic vision, I wanted to make a game just for the sake of making a game, and because I thought it would be fun.

Little did I know at the time, there was a series of programs being released in Japan that would have made my life a whole lot easier, had I known about them. Theoretically, anyway; I have no idea how good or user-friendly the early versions of the program were. This series of programs has the very self explanatory name “RPG Maker”, and it is still widely used by gaming fans worldwide who want to experience the joy of making a video game without actually needing to have any of the knowledge required to make a video game.

It’s available on Steam, and is responsible for a lot of the poorest purchasing decisions Steam users have ever made. I’m not saying that RPG Maker is a bad purchase, but masterminds of business love to pay $5 to download an old version of the program, slap anything together, even if it’s a single screen with nothing to do, in the hopes of tricking people into buying their supposed game.

Today’s story isn’t about one of those games, however. This was not a disgusting attempt to scam a few strangers out of a buck. It was made with RPG Maker, but it was distributed for free. It was also a complete game and was considered to be quite entertaining. Not necessarily a good game, but funny and entertaining enough to be worth the time. Little did anyone realize at the time, but the game itself was only a façade for something much deeper.

The Plot

Kanye Quest 3030 was released on July 22, 2013, and described itself as a “hip-hop themed science fiction 2D role-playing game”, which is extremely accurate. While any reasonable listener would be able to make this conclusion on their own, I would be remiss if I did not explicitly state for the sake of Simon and his lawyers that Kanye West had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of this game. This was a fan-made game, and the names and likenesses of the rappers were used without permission. Now that that’s out of the way, what was the game all about?

It’s January 2010, and our hero, Kanye West, is looking to take out the trash. I don’t mean that like he’s going to put a bunch of hoodlums or talentless rappers in their place, he is literally going to take out the trash. But oh no!

He tripped into a wormhole and is transported to the year 3030 where the world has been absolutely overrun by clones of rappers. It is a dystopian future, ruled by a clone of Lil B, The Based God. But it has been prophesized that one day “The Yeezy One” will come forth and set the true Based God free.

The game just goes on like this. It is mostly one big joke and does not take itself seriously, but it features plenty of popular rappers with clever references for their abilities, such as The RZA’s (pronounced riz-a) “Tiger Style” or LL Cool J’s “Knock You Out”. Kanye Quest was an immediate hit, and the story got picked up by Rolling Stone, Vice, Kotaku, and other large online publications.

Despite only being available through a Tumblr link and the RPG Maker website, it received hundreds of thousands of downloads, maybe even over a million. It’s impossible to say for sure, as the user’s Tumblr is gone and RPG Maker has removed it from their site.

One of the ways the game gives its exposition is via computer terminals. They have game tutorials, tell you your current tasks, and, of course, remind you to praise The Based God. Early on in the game, there is a broken terminal that gives you a damaged message.

Some letters in the message are replaced with either periods or slashes, but you can tell the message is meant to say “ASCEND and worship The Based God”. It seems like just a useless message put there for ambience; I’m sure it’s nothing. A little later in the game, you encounter a character who asks you what you want to do, and are prompted to type up to 6 characters.

It’s the only prompt of this type in the game, and whatever you say you want to do, she just says she wants to do that too. No one thought anything of this and most people typed either nothing or dirty words. As far as anyone knows, it took two years for a single person to enter the word “ASCEND”.

The Twist

“Congratulations! You have proven yourself to be an open-minded and curious thinker. We must apologize for deceiving you, but we can reveal that the game you were playing until this point was a ‘front’ constructed to protect what you are currently accessing.

We must ask that you do not reveal this area to the public. If you believe that you may be prone to revealing information, or do not wish to participate, please close this program immediately…The following is a thought exercise designed to help teach you something beneficial. By undertaking this exercise, you will hopefully be affected in a positive way.

Due to the nature of the exercise, this ‘something’ cannot be revealed immediately. This exercise may or may not be restricted to this software. It is important to remember that the purpose of this exercise is to benefit you.

You will not be timed. We cannot provide any more information, except that we wish you good luck. You may begin now.

Welcome to your ascension.”

This is the message that would appear if you said that you wanted to ascend. Well, first you had to be transformed into a butterfly and teleported to a grayscale pyramid full of computer terminals, because of course you do, but then this message would appear. The computer terminals acted as a series of gates, each simply displayed a Roman numeral for which terminal it was, and a prompt for a password.

There were no hints or clues as to what the passwords were or how you might find them. If you flew your butterfly outside of this pyramid, you would enter a massive courtyard. There were no other buildings you could enter, but in the middle of the courtyard was a massive QR code.

It was impossible to fit the whole thing on your screen at once, so you would have to walk around it, take four separate screenshots, then splice them together to obtain the full code. Doing this and following the QR code link revealed something truly surprising: a dead link. Perhaps a great number of people had already found this secret area and actually been honest when asked if they promised to keep it secret from the public, so many people that no more were needed.

Perhaps no one found it and the creator gave up and shut the site down.

Neither answer is satisfying. The first makes no sense because people suck at keeping secrets, especially random anonymous people on the internet, but the second option is borderline infuriating. Someone went through all the trouble to make this game as a front for something else, and yet barely two years after the game’s creation they had given up?

Web hosting isn’t that expensive, and if whatever you’re hiding in this game is so important then I think you can shell out a couple bucks per month to keep it going. Hell, they even went through the trouble of releasing a trailer for Kanye Quest on Youtube, but we’ll get to that momentarily. With the QR code link not functioning, there was only one option left: users were going to have to datamine the game to find all the passwords.

And someone did, probably pretty easily. There were 33 passwords total, each being random words with no connection to much of anything. Upon entering all 33 passwords correctly, the screen would flash as though it were starting a random enemy encounter, and display the words “JFZZJNMS emerged!”

Instead of a battle, you were then greeted with another terminal that read “Congratulations, you have ascended. Thank you for playing.” A final password prompt would come up, and this one we have a solution for.

The final terminal was labeled XXXIV, as the 34th password you needed. If we assume JFZZJNMS is the encrypted password, through a bit of work we could find that it is a Vigenere Cipher using the key XXXIVYES, the beginning being the Roman numbers, and “yes” saying that yes you want to continue ascending or something to that effect. I know Simon may have had enough of that sort of thing after the Cicada 3301 episode, but if you want to cover internet mysteries, you’re going to have to deal with ciphers.

Anyway, this gives us some idea of what puzzles the QR link would have asked the user to solve for the other 33 passwords. Harder than a well known riddle, but not so hard that it can’t be solved with only a mild amount of persistence and thought.

“You have proven your worth once again. You have ascended. However, further ascension is always possible. If you do not wish to ascend further, your journey ends here, so please close this program by pressing ALT-F4 or selecting the NO option above. By selecting the YES option, you agree to participate further and you grant us permission to interact with your possessions. Would you like to participate?

Over the following two week time period, we will interact with you and your possessions in several ways. Keep an eye out, as some of these ways may be subtle. Others may not be. We may attempt to contact you directly. If we do this, we will attempt to notify you of our presence using a key-word. If you still consent to participation, please select the YES option above. Do you wish to participate?”

This was the message received from entering the final password. If you select yes, it then asks you to enter your full name and address. Once you do, the final message just tells you to “Enjoy the next two weeks and await instructions.” On the one hand, I think it would be hard to enjoy the next two weeks wondering if random strangers were going to mess with me and all my stuff, but on the other, this would only be happening if I actually gave them permission and my personal information.

What is all this ascension nonsense, anyway? It almost sounds like some sort of cult. But before we go forward, we need to go back.

The Trailer

The trailer for Kanye Quest 3030 was published to Youtube on July 20, 2013, two days before the game was released. It opens with quotes from gaming magazines that I assumed were fake, especially since one refers to it as “the greatest video game of all time”. After a little investigation, I found the original articles and it turns out that these were all genuine comments from actual publications about this game.

I’m still reeling from that fact. The game is funny, but it’s not THAT funny. In general, the trailer shows what you would expect.

When it shows the game, it opens with “This is Kanye West. Today he will go on a Kanye Quest.” Cute.

It then shows off about a minute of standard, mediocre RPG Maker gameplay. There’s a few things in this trailer that are worth mentioning, however, especially because it came out before the game and because it took so long for the internet to find the game’s secret.

First, the trailer opens with Mozart’s Requiem. It is Mozart’s darkest piece of music, and the one he was working on when he died. It’s a pretty stark contrast to the light-hearted, comical, and hip-hop themed game itself.

One could argue that Requiem was chosen to be melodramatic and give the trailer more gravitas, but the music changes to a MIDI version of Kanye West’s song Power when the gameplay starts. These could all be artistic choices, were it not for what came later. One of the articles quoted in this trailer links to a different trailer, the trailer for the Alpha version of the game.

The Alpha was likely the same game, just with the “ascend” trigger deactivated. Other than the lack of journalist quotes at the beginning, the trailers seemed identical at first. However, at the end of the trailer for the free, public version of the game, there was five seconds of silence with an all black image screen, followed by what sounded like Morse code and a brief flash.

The Morse code spelled out the word “ascend”, a word which also appeared spelled out in Morse code in the “about” section of the uploader’s page. The flash at the end of the video was this image:

One could argue that the biggest mystery here is how it took the internet two years to realize that there might be more to this game than appeared at first glance.

Ascensionism

Have you ever found yourself wishing you could turn victim blaming into a religion? Then Ascensionism is the cult for you! Information on Ascensionism is difficult to find for several reasons.

It is new, with the earliest known mentions being in 2006. So it is at least a solid six years older than Kanye Quest, but not old even old enough to have a beer yet. Ascensionism also seems to be extremely small, like a cult that hasn’t really gotten its bearing yet.

Oh yeah, and since I keep referring to it as a cult, cults don’t normally make lots of information about themselves publically known. They’ll give you the highlights and a lot of promises to entice you in, but they’re not going to post an online calendar showing their upcoming recruitment drives, bake sales, and blood orgies. Finally, and one of the biggest problems, is that “ascensionism” is such a fucking generic name, and “ascension” is a pretty religiously charged word already.

Between other religious discussions and all the focus on Kanye Quest itself, finding hard facts is a difficult feat.

From the data available, here’s the short version of Ascensionism: Your spirit has too parts, the physical (body) and ethereal (soul). When the body dies, the soul will judge itself, and if it deems itself to have been sufficiently good then it will destroy itself and become “primordial soulstuffs”, whatever the fuck that means, from which new souls are created. Any bad things that happen to a person are because their soul in previous lives had not been good enough, so they had it coming.

If hearing someone argue that a girl “had it coming” because of how she was dressed makes your blood boil, and unless you’re a disgusting piece of shit it should, imagine having to read someone say that she had it coming because of all the bad things she did in a past life. That’s also why babies get cancer, they’re like reincarnated serial killers or something. It’s all really vile, but opens the door for manipulating vulnerable people on both sides of the spectrum.

The weak and suffering can be recruited by telling them that “everything bad that happened to you is your own fault for having a bad soul, but we can help you ascend!” And then for recruiting bitter sociopaths, they can just turn the same sentiment around. “You never have to feel bad for anything you do to someone else, because they deserved it from their past lives.”

The cognitive dissonance a sane person would experience when being told about a religion based on blaming you for things that are beyond your control while absolving you of the things that are in your control is staggering, so it’s no wonder they don’t seem to have caught on very much. I’m pretty sure Simon is enough of a big brain not to have tried to make this argument, but if anyone listening is thinking that no sane person would join a cult anyway, they absolutely would. All it takes is one sufficiently traumatic experience followed by a person offering them a lot of hope and easy answers to convert an otherwise sane and healthy person.

Despite being such a newly formed cult, I have also seen references to “orthodox Ascensionism”. These absurd cultists allegedly can’t even get their shit together enough to agree on what they believe. The orthodox Ascensionist belief is that before a soul combines with a new body, it makes pacts with the souls of any person they will encounter in their next life time about how that will go down.

So they believe that, because the souls have made these contracts, everyone was very literally asking for it whenever someone else harms them. Gross. As a personal side note, while I don’t know what primordial soulstuff is, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t want my soul to self destruct and turn into it.

If I genuinely believed I had an immortal soul that could go from one life to the next, it kinda sounds like good motivation to be just bad enough to ensure that my soul doesn’t judge itself ready for termination.

Theories

So why did I tell you about this objectively horrible belief system? It should be pretty obvious, but the most prevalent theory about this game for the past seven years has been that it was a recruitment tool for the Ascensionists. Until about six months ago, it seemed pretty likely, too.

This would not really be uncharted waters as a means of cult recruitment, and once entering the secret part of the game, a lot of the markers for how cults operate and indoctrinate new recruits are there. The symbol that appeared at the end of the trailer for Kanye Quest was also the logo for Ascensionism Records who have eight digital releases on bandcamp.com. I listened to one of the songs, a 22 minute instrumental piece called “Beginning”.

It’s no Justin Bieber, but it’s not bad. It also definitely sounds like something that a cult might play during a ritual sacrifice. Everything was pointing to this being a recruitment tool for a cult, but in 2021 the creator of Ascensionism Records, Valyri Sheffner Harris, stepped out from the shadows and had an interview with the Game Theorists.

She admitted to creating Ascensionism Records and the logo, and working under a number of various aliases throughout the years. The project was inspired by her fascination with cults, and she wanted to make something with a cult-like feel. She was also sharing links to her work on message boards and chat rooms for Indie game developers, and said they could use anything they wanted for free, as long as she was given credit.

Despite her not having any involvement directly in the creation of Kanye Quest, this seemed to wrap everything up neatly in a bow. Except for all the stuff it didn’t, like the fact that references to Ascensionism as a religion predate her art by several years. Now that we knew the symbol at the end of Kanye Quest was the logo for her fictional version of Ascensionism, the evidence seemed to be strongly pointing towards a second theory.

The second popular theory was that this was all part of an ARG, or Alternate Reality Game. The creator of Kanye Quest could have been making his game for the lulz, then saw Valyri’s work and decided he wanted to incorporate a creepy, cult-like ARG storyline into his game. There’s a decent amount of evidence to back this up, and not just the blatantly obvious hints at the end of the trailer.

Two months after Kanye Quest was released, a user on the ARG focused website Unfiction posted a link to a video claiming it was about the Ascenionism cult. Much of what played out was a lot like a normal ARG, but the most notable aspect was that some of the keywords that were deciphered through the puzzle were the same as the passwords needed for Kanye Quest. It’s very likely that the creator of Kanye Quest got tired of waiting for people to find the secret part of the game, and was using a new and more traditional ARG to do…whatever it is people who make ARG’s are trying to accomplish.

This was also likely the same person who made the post on Pastebin in 2015 which revealed that the secret area existed in Kanye Quest at all. After two failed attempts to get his ARG off the ground, his work finally got the attention he was after. A major clue that points to this being an ARG and not a cult recruiting tool is the fact that Kanye Quest does not have any internet connectivity.

At the end of your ascension when you enter your personal information, there is a six second pause programmed into the game to make it appear like it is being uploaded to the cult’s servers, but the game never connects to the internet at all. There’s a lot of speculation that the QR code may have included malware to get your personal info, or that there was an original build of the game that did include a way to send data online built into it, but none of this can be confirmed.

Wrap Up

Kanye Quest 3030 was an amusing enough game, that held within it a dark secret. Or another game. There’s no way to know. Even if all the information revealed by Valyri is true, it doesn’t preclude the possibility that this game wasn’t intended as a cult recruiting tool.

Ascensionism as a “religion” does seem to predate all of her art projects involving it by several years, and it’s such a generic name that the creator of Kanye Quest could have been trying to use it as a recruitment tool, and after stumbling upon her work, included it in the game thinking it was genuine Ascensionist material. If it was just an ARG, why did it not seem to actually go anywhere? And if the existence of the secret was indeed revealed by the game’s creator, why wouldn’t he renew his domain subscription so the QR code needed to solve the puzzles would actually work?

We have two perfectly plausible possibilities, but neither is a fully satisfactory answer so it’s hard to say which is more likely. As long as the creator of Kanye Quest remains a mystery, we will likely never know for sure. There are only two things that can be said for certain. The first is that while this could either be a cult recruiting tool or an ARG, in neither case was it implemented properly.

The second is that because the “religion” appears to be a real belief system held by people and was not created for this game, anyone who believes in Ascensionism can fuck right off. And if any of you victim blaming sociopaths have a problem with that, you can GET IN THE COMMENTS and let me know. Remember, Simon, death threats in the comments count as engagement, so whatever it takes to feed the Youtube algorithm gods.

Bonus Facts

Despite being both the titular character and “The Yeezy One”, Kanye West is surprisingly the weakest character in your party. 2Pac, RZA, and MF DOOM all outshine his abilities in the game’s mundane battle system.

Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with. That’s it. That’s the whole fact.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the original inspiration for Kanye Quest 3030?

The game was inspired by the creator’s childhood desire to make an RPG, which was his favorite type of game at the time.

When was Kanye Quest 3030 released?

Kanye Quest 3030 was released on July 22, 2013.

What is the plot of Kanye Quest 3030?

The game is set in January 2010, where Kanye West trips into a wormhole and is transported to the year 3030, a dystopian future ruled by a clone of Lil B, The Based God.

What is the significance of the word ‘ASCEND’ in the game?

The word ‘ASCEND’ is a trigger that, when entered, reveals a hidden part of the game with a series of puzzles and a potential recruitment message.

What is Ascensionism?

Ascensionism is a belief system where the spirit has two parts, the physical (body) and ethereal (soul). Upon death, the soul judges itself and, if deemed good, destroys itself to become ‘primordial soulstuffs’ from which new souls are created.

What are the two main theories about Kanye Quest 3030?

The two main theories are that the game was either a recruitment tool for the Ascensionism cult or part of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG).

What evidence supports the ARG theory?

Evidence supporting the ARG theory includes the game’s lack of internet connectivity, the creator’s use of an ARG-focused website, and the revelation of the secret area’s existence on Pastebin.

Who is Valyri Sheffner Harris and what is her connection to Kanye Quest 3030?

Valyri Sheffner Harris is the creator of Ascensionism Records and the logo used in Kanye Quest 3030. She admitted to creating the logo and sharing it freely with indie game developers, but had no direct involvement in the game’s creation.

What is the significance of the QR code in the game?

The QR code in the game was intended to lead players to further puzzles, but the link was dead, leaving players to datamine the game for passwords instead.

What happens if a player enters the word ‘ASCEND’ in the game?

Entering the word ‘ASCEND’ transforms the player into a butterfly, teleports them to a grayscale pyramid, and reveals a series of computer terminals with passwords to unlock.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Kanye Quest 3030: A Cult Recruiting Tool?
• Hero image source by Asanagi / openverse, cc0.