David Bowie’s 1999 Gaming Adventure and Virtual Album
Continuing his exploration of virtual personas, in 1999 David Bowie plays two 3D characters in a game called 'Omikron: The Nomad Soul'. The songs he contributes are later added to his album, Hours.
On May 12, 1999, a surprising announcement came over the wires.
“Eidos Interactive, a leading worldwide developer and publisher of interactive entertainment, today announced a collaboration with legendary rocker David Bowie on Omikron: The Nomad Soul,” read the press release. It went on to explain that Bowie and his guitarist Reeves Gabrels had “worked closely with the game's developers, Paris-based Quantic Dream, to create original music for the game, including eight new songs.”
The concept of this 3D game involved a futuristic city called Omikron, demons that collect souls, and (like Bowie’s 1995 Outside album concept) a spate of serial killings. It was another chance for Bowie to play with virtual personas. Even more intriguing to his fans was the promise of “the first-ever virtual album, which characters in the game can purchase, take back to their virtual apartment and play.”
The game was designed by Quantic Dream founder David Cage (real name David De Gruttola), then in his late-20s. It was clearly a passion project, as Cage had started writing the concept and story of The Nomad Soul in 1994.
Despite being a professional musician himself, Cage wanted someone else to do the soundtrack. According to a later interview with Omikron’s senior designer, Phillip Campbell, the artist that Cage initially wanted for the project was Björk. But to his surprise, Bowie not only wanted to do the music, he wanted a role inside the virtual game world too.
Bowie later attributed his keenness to be involved with his son Duncan, who was just a couple of years younger than Cage and a passionate gamer. “I'm not really into games very much, I don't know very much about them,” Bowie said in 1999. “But my son is a gamer and we explored it together, and he came to the conclusion that it [Omikron] was probably one of the better games that you work with, and advised his father that he should do the music.”
During April, Bowie went to Paris to record the soundtrack and have his physical likeness scanned by motion capture machines. He ended up playing two characters in the game. One was a blue-skinned virtual being named Boz, while the other was the 18-year-old leader of a virtual band called The Dreamers (named “David Jones” in the game).
Boz and Bowie
Boz’s backstory is that he’d been a hacker in meatspace, but was attacked by a demon and escaped into the Omikron network. “He can never come back,” according to an explainer from GameFAQs. “From then on he could move around at will among the various stations of the network, in the printed circuits of terminals, between the lines of programming code.”
Boz is the character that explains the game’s goal to the user. “An old legend recounts that only a nomad soul can hunt the demons out of Omikron,” he says in the introduction. “You may be the one we have been waiting for. I must go. Now the binary tides are turning. May Vyagrimukha guide your steps.”
Phillip Campbell later tried to spin this into a parable about Bowie himself wanting to leave his alter-egos inside the game.
“He wanted to take Bowie into Omikron and leave him there and come out the other side as David Jones," he told Eurogamer.net. “He wanted to take his life back and leave Bowie. Bowie would be gone forever.”
But there’s no evidence that Bowie was thinking of it in such personal terms. Based on an interview he did when the game was released, he simply wanted to inhabit the character of Boz, similar to what he did in his various movie roles.
“I saw Boz as being a kind of digital patchwork quilt,” he told GameCenter, “made up of all sorts of shifting patterns, fleeting thoughts, and fractured memories — someone who would slip in and out of focus, one moment drifting and world-weary, the next absolutely concise and direct.”
The Virtual Album
Years later, Cage recalled to Le Monde how Bowie came to Paris and collaborated with him on the game’s music.
“The musical work was very particular about this project: we're locked in an apartment in Paris with him and one of his musicians, Reeves Gabrels, for a month almost every day. I brought all the designs of the game, the script, my notes littering the apartment, and several hours a day, I told him the story moment by moment, we watched the images together, we talked about the universe, the history of this world, and after I left, he was working on music.”
By his own account, Bowie enjoyed the creative process of integrating his music into the game. For the young band leader character, “David Jones,” Bowie contributed three songs: “Survive,” “Something In The Air,” and “The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell.”
While they’re all fine songs, they don’t really match the character. The first two songs are relatively slow-paced and the lyrics are something a middle-aged man would write, rather than an 18-year old youth. “Survive” begins with a regretful look back on a lost love:
Oh, my
Naked eyes
I should have kept you
I should have tried
I should have been a wiser kind of guy
I miss you
Likewise, the song “Something In The Air” has the mood of an older man reflecting on his past:
Lived with the best times
Left with the worst
I've danced with you too long
Nothing left to save
At least the pace of the music picks up in “The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell.” It’s a song more befitting a teenage virtual rock star, although the lyrics betray a kind of world weariness:
You're still breathing but you don't know why
Life's a bit and sometimes you die
You're still breathing but you just can't tell
Don't hold your breath but the pretty things are going to hell
You can watch all three songs by virtual David Jones in this video:
Cage later admitted that he was rather surprised by the music Bowie provided.
“The soundtrack was totally different from what I expected,” he told Edge magazine. “The world was cold and dehumanised sci-fi, but the soundtrack was human, full of melody and acoustic instruments.”
However, Cage and Bowie eventually figured out a way to integrate the songs into the Omikron storyline. “The actual logic behind the Dreamers’ concert performances, and the way in which they are seen to be receiving ‘visions in song and dance’ from Earth, was all resolved in these long brainstorming sessions,” Bowie said in 1999.
Reeves Gabrels, also present at the Paris meetings and who co-wrote the three Dreamers songs, later tried to justify the wistful tone of the songs. Their characters were “street/protest singers,” he said, “and so needed a more singer-songwriter approach.” He added that “it was the opposite approach from the usual cheesy industrial metal music one would normally get” from video game music. [Via 2016 edition of Nicholas Pegg’s book, The Complete David Bowie.]
From Dreamers to Hours
All three of the Dreamers tracks would make it onto Bowie’s album, 'hours...', released in October 1999. It was at this point that Bowie re-framed the songs as the retrospective and sometimes melancholic musings of a 52-year old man.
“I wanted to capture a kind of universal angst felt by many people of my age,” he explained. “You could say that I am attempting to write some songs for my generation.”
Ultimately, Bowie’s involvement in Omikron wasn’t quite as immersive as it was later portrayed. The scenes with Boz talking run for no longer than five minutes in total, and his role as the younger rock star was contained to straight-forward concert scenes.
But while the tone of the concert songs seemed off, the music used as background during the game worked much better. In particular, “New Angels of Promise” meshed with the game’s dark cybernoir mood in both sound and lyrics.
New angels of promise (doo doo, doo doo)
We despair (doo doo, doo doo)
We are the dead dreams (oh oh, oh oh)
We take the blame
Take us to the edge of time
Omikron vs. Online Games
Omikron received middling reviews on release. For example, a New York Times review in January 2000 praised the game's "highly cinematic" aesthetics, but criticized its lack of interactivity.
The NYT reviewer, J. C. Herz, unfavorably compared Omikron's "stagy" characters with two popular MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), Everquest and Ultima Online. In those games, she wrote, "there are thousands of characters animated by human beings and their subplots and relationships and histories." The MMORPGs "feel full because they convey a sense of human presence," she continued, whereas "Omikron feels empty because its characters are walking props."
Herz's critique feels even more true a quarter of a century later. Everquest, which debuted in 1999, is now regarded as the first fully 3D MMORPG to gain major popularity. World of Warcraft, released in 2004, took it to another level again. After that, user-generated content games like Minecraft and Roblox brought even more "human presence" to gaming.
But while Omikron is now largely forgotten, Bowie's "virtual album" — which morphed into the introspective Hours — has only become more beloved over time. Especially for middle-aged webheads like me.
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