How the Kendrick-Drake Beef Became a Viral Video Game
Musician and developer Richie Branson’s Not Like Us: The Game sees Kendrick Lamar smacking owls, but he says it’s nothing personal
“Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop.” Those five words are among the most memorable of all the vicious punches thrown by Kendrick Lamar in his Drake diss track “Not Like Us” — and now, they have inspired a video game. Not Like Us: The Game is a web-based whack-a-mole clone based on the imagery from the song’s music video, in which, accompanying those very words, Kendrick beats an owl piñata until its candy innards pour out.
But to the game’s designer, Richie Branson (real name Marcus Brown II), the game itself is really all about love — for hip-hop, gaming, and of course, virality.
“I did this for the people,” Branson tells Rolling Stone. “I did it as a love letter to hip-hop and music, and because of that I wanted to make sure people would enjoy it. This particular game and the way it was set up, [with] Kendrick smacking owls around — I thought that would be the most enjoyable way of expressing my love of hip-hop music.”
Not Like Us: The Game is extremely simple. After loading the site in a web browser, users play as Kendrick, bat in hand, waiting for owls to pop up in one of four directions, at progressively increasing speed, to be hit. The addictive loop is bolstered by a chiptune rendition of the title track that Branson himself produced in just a few hours.
“I didn’t want to put the actual music in there,” he says. “As a musician, I understand you just can’t rip somebody’s song. Since I’m a music producer, I was like, ‘Let me just remake the beat.’ At the 11th hour, I felt like the recipe was there. The beat was the sugar on top of what was already gonna be a great sundae.”
Branson has a long history of working in the crossover space between music and gaming. Beginning his career as a producer working at labels like Def Jam, his work has drawn inspiration from anime and Japanese RPGs like Chrono Trigger, and been featured on channels like Adult Swim, where his 2012 song “Bring Back Toonami” became part of the official broadcast for the programming block’s return.
A college dropout, Branson taught himself the basics of game design after working on tracks for titles like Marvel Heroes, which eventually led to outreach from Harmonix, the developers of Rock Band. The musician-turned-designer was working for the studio when they were acquired by Fortnite creators Epic Games, which brought Branson onto a project that would later become Fortnite Festival, a mode released in December 2023 for the free-to-play multiplayer game’s ecosystem. After nearly two years with Epic, Branson left to pursue his own ambitions.
Like the rest of the known world, Branson saw the release of the “Not Like Us” video as a huge cultural moment, and he was immediately inspired by it.
“As soon as I saw the piñata scene,” he says, “I was like, ‘That should be a game.’”
But work on the game didn’t begin immediately. Instead, the designer waited for a few days before coming down with food poisoning. Bed-ridden, he returned to his idea.
Branson explains that the original iteration of the game saw Kendrick hitting the owls into cages for points, but it didn’t quite click. Boiling it down even further, he took inspiration from games like 2013’s Flappy Bird and 2014’s Crossy Road, whose simplicity belied addictive gameplay that led to their virality.
According to Branson, the game’s development took roughly seven days from beginning to end, including both versions of the game and the music production. Fully coding the game himself, he worked with his teammates at collective Coexist Gaming to refine and release the final version.
Even though the game was born from Kendrick’s perceived dominance of the public feud, Branson wants people to know that he’s “absolutely not a Drake hater.” In fact, he says that Drake is probably his most played artist on Spotify. He just doesn’t let his biases get in the way of making a good game. He says it’s a skill he acquired while creating viral content for brands like Bleacher Report.
“I used to create memes when sports teams would lose and when sports teams would win,” he says. “And sometimes my favorite team wouldn’t win, but I’d still have to make the meme. It hurt a little bit, but at the same time it really thickened my skin. It’s a motto to live by: Viruses don’t play favorites, and neither does viral content. When a social moment arises and you want to capture lightning in a bottle, you can’t play favorites.”
In response to Drake fans decrying the game, Branson has the receipts to show his lack of bias. After all, this isn’t his first game inspired by a public feud with Drake. He previously developed another web-based game called Meeky Mill in 2016, centering on Drake’s then-beef with rapper Meek Mill. The game lets users take on the roles of Drake and 50 Cent tossing L’s at Meek with side-scrolling mechanics.
A fan of both artists in this year’s biggest beef, Branson admits that Kendrick is winning. He says he would have made a game starring Drake had he been coming out on top. But that’s simply not how it is. With that, he’s committed to making the best game possible for the fans, down to its lyric-based easter eggs.
In a post on X, the designer teased a feature in the game where it actually gets harder after hitting a score of 18, a direct reference to Kendrick’s claims that Drake has been involved with minors under the legal age of consent (which Drake has denied).
“After you get to 17, the difficulty ramps up to a very high degree,” Branson says. “That was definitely intentional, obviously, [with] the ‘A minor’ bar. If you get over 18, you should be proud of yourself. If you get under 18, you might not be like us.”
But there’s one other secret that the game’s creator says hasn’t yet been discovered, at least not to his knowledge. It, too, is a direct reference to visuals from the “Not Like Us” video.
“The way the collision boxes are set up on the tap,” he explains, “there is a certain level where you can tap close to Kendrick’s body, but not close to the owl – in between Kendrick and the owl. You tap there, the owl will be hit without Kendrick moving. That is a reference to the scene in the music video where Drake is kind of sneaking up behind [Kendrick] and he telepathically moves him away.”
Overall, Branson is just pleased that people are enjoying the game, whatever their level of fandom may be. For him, creating viral content that connects with audiences is the most important goal: He wants to show fans from backgrounds like his own that game development is a viable path for all.
“My biggest sort of flex,” he says, “is the fact that I’m doing this, and I can show people who look like me that there are other routes to be successful [in] game design. It’s not rocket science.”