David Bowie Becomes A Video Game Character

David Bowie was never meant to be in late 90s video game Omikron: The Nomad Soul. In fact, he would never even have recorded a note of music for it if it had been solely up to its creator, French gaming auteur David Cage.

“Cage’s list of bands went Björk, Radiohead, Future Sound Of London, Garbage,” Omikron’s Portrush-bred Senior Designer Phil Campbell tells MOJO. “I threw Bowie on there because I’d been in the fan club since I was 11 – and I knew he would complement the world we were creating.”

In 1998, Cage’s company Quantic Dream had partnered with Campbell’s employers Eidos – the makers of Tomb Raider – to develop one of the world’s first ‘open world’ games: an alternate reality to explore, run about, to shoot and get shot in. Entering the game, you could be reincarnated as various trapped souls in a mythical dystopia bossed by enigmatic demons whose hegemony you strove to battle and escape. With its complex and mystical back story and regeneration mechanic, it sounds like exactly the computer game you’d expect David Bowie to be in. But that was never the plan.

 “When we went to meet him, it was just about licensing his old music,” says Campbell. “But he loved David Cage’s vision for Omikron – that you were sucked into this world; the themes of oppression and being awakened – and he loved [art director] Loïc Normand’s visuals. The next meeting he brought Iman and Joe [aka Duncan/Zowie]. Then he brought Reeves Gabrels.”

Instead of licensing his music, Bowie stunned Campbell by saying he wanted to write new songs, and to better embed in Omikron he joined the creative team for two weeks in a Paris apartment, smoking cigarette after cigarette of Campbell’s. “I saw the computer program he used to do his William Burroughs lyric cut-ups on,” says Campbell. “He said, ‘I used to do it manually but now I have this.’”

Bowie’s unexpected immersion in the project fuelled creativity. They devised an in-game rock band called The Dreamers based on Bowie, Gabrels and Bowie band bassist Gail-Ann Dorsey. Playing the game, you could stumble on any of three concerts they performed, showcasing Bowie’s three new showstoppers: Seven, Survive and The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell. Virtual Reeves was half-man, half-guitar, the vocalist a willowy young fellow with a mask that had slipped up onto the top of his head. “We were talking about this young singer,” Campbell recalls of one brainstorming session, “and Bowie said, ‘He could almost be David Jones…’”

Team Bowie’s involvement did not end there. One of the ‘souls’ you could play as was a polygonal representation of Iman. Another character was Boz: a kind of living computer hologram who led Omikron’s resistance movement, The Awakened. If you were lucky enough to encounter him and harvest his advice, you’d find he looked, and sounded, rather familiar. “I can’t remember when it was decided that Boz should be Bowie,” says Campbell. “It might just have been us pushing our luck. But he was super-super on-board. We put him through the indignity of having dots stuck all over his face for the motion capture. He’d never done that before.”

But there was another shock in store for Campbell, one that promised huge repercussions for Omikron and for Bowie – his future and his past.

“One day David said, could he leave his Bowie persona in Omikron, and come out as David Jones?,” says Campbell, still reeling slightly at the memory. “It was a delicious thought – did he crave the anonymity of that? – and it fitted the spirit of the game: Omikron was a giant trap, you could lose your soul in there forever.”

However that might have worked, it would have been killer marketing for Omikron – and another baffling Bowie story for a press still scratching their heads over his recent immersion in drum’n’bass or his fixation on this new-fangled internet. But Omikron did not become the final resting place of David Jones’s longest-running persona. As Campbell concedes, it wasn’t a big enough hit – no Tomb Raider, no Ziggy Stardust.

“It did OK,” he says. “It sold about 600,000 units in the end, but 500,000 of those were in Europe. It got no press in America. David did some chat shows – Letterman would show the box. But something about it didn’t gel enough for people even to try it. I think David was a bit pissed off.”

There was an afterlife for Omikron’s songs, which resurfaced, with some adjustments, on Bowie’s 1999 album, Hours, the game’s ‘theme’ song retooled as New Angels Of Promise, the album’s cover (floppy haired ’99 Bowie cradles goateed ’97 Bowie as per the Madonna della Pietà) revisiting Omikron’s regeneration theme. And Bowie and Campbell continued to meet up for the odd brainstorm, like the one in around 2000. “We talked about buying up a bunch of old satellites that were circling the earth,” says Campbell, “and he was going to relaunch Ziggy Stardust from space. The idea was that Ziggy would beam us transmissions – ‘Are you receiving me…?’”

And there was an epilogue. In January 2016, on the night Bowie died, Omikron: The Nomad Soul was released for free, everywhere. “Of course it’s so hard to play with modern technology,” says Campbell, “but people were playing it. You know, there’s a lot of retrospective love for Omikron and Bowie’s role in it. People still send letters about doing a sequel. It was so hyper-ambitious – in some ways the perfect game for Bowie. He was always about doing something different.”

This article originally appeared in MOJO 322