Chance the Rapper lends hit ‘I Love You So Much’ to new video game — designed by CPS students

A CPS student plays SuperMe, a video game created by other CPS students, on Monday. Chance the Rapper announced the song was chosen as the official game of the song, “I Love You So Much.” | Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Thanks to Chance the Rapper — and a bunch of Chicago Public Schools students — there’s a new game in town.

On Monday, the Grammy-winning South Side native dropped the official video game for “I Love You So Much,” his hit collaboration with DJ Khaled. It’s reportedly the first time a platinum artist has ever attached an online game to a single instead of the traditional music video treatment.

And it’s basically the opposite of a Fortnite-style shoot-em-up game. It’s called SuperMe, a kid-friendly superhero game created by CPS students from seven South Side schools.

“I’m so proud of Chicago Public School students — for their creativity, their work in learning to code and the community that made this happen,” said Chance, via a pre-recorded message broadcast during a launch party event held Monday morning at the South Shore Cultural Center as part of Google’s Computer Science Education Week kickoff.

The party was attended by 400 CPS students from the schools that contributed to the game — many of whom loudly clapped and cheered when the famous rapper appeared onscreen. After the announcement, groups of kids excitedly lined up to take their turn at playing SuperMe for the first time at nearby stations set up by Google.

SuperMe isn’t the vision of one person, but a stitched-together version of bits and pieces of dozens of games coded by students over the 2019 school year. You play as a superhero (all digitized self-portraits of CPS students) whose job is to fly through a colorful, hand-drawn version of Chicago’s skyline, which includes the John Hancock building as well as other landmarks, and collect as many floating hearts as you can in 30 seconds. “I Love You So Much” plays in the background and there is even what appears to be a CPS bus passing by.

SuperMe can be played for free on Google’s Computer Science Education Week website.

Getting Chance involved was the idea of a few of the young programmers.

They “wanted the song in the game,” said Justin Cunningham, executive director of SocialWorks, Chance’s nonprofit. Chance “saw it and he was like, ‘Oh, wow. This should be the official video game for this song.’” It’s about celebrating the individual superheroes in our own lives and there’s nothing better to say to them than I love you.”

The genesis of SuperMe goes back to 2017, when Google provided a $1.5 million grant to SocialWorks and the CPS computer science initiative CS4ALL in order to provide 20 schools on the South Side with extra resources for computer science and STEM programs. Google representatives also announced an additional grant of $250,000 for SocialWorks on Monday.

As part of that initiative, 400 students were enrolled in a 10-hour workshop to learn Scratch— a free coding platform for kids that teaches them how to make video games.

“It a way to let kids use code to create the types of things that are personally meaningful to them,” said Champika Fernando, director of Outreach and Education for Scratch. “We see it as a real way to get them interested in coding.”

Chance, who is an avid gamer, doesn’t appear in SuperMe beyond the soundtrack — yet. But don’t be surprised if he makes a cameo eventually, said Cunningham.

“He possibly might create his own sprite and upload it. But you’ve got to play the game a couple of times to catch that,” laughed Cunningham.

Students from seven South Side elementary schools work on a coding themed word search Monday.