The original version of this article was published on 11 January 2016, the day after David Bowie died, and it pointed readers towards a single strange artefact: a video game in which Bowie does not merely cameo, but acts, sings, and quite literally haunts the machine. That game is Omikron: The Nomad Soul, the 1999 debut of French studio Quantic Dream — an adventure in which the player is a soul from another world, summoned into a parallel city, able to possess its citizens one body at a time. Bowie called one of his two characters “the internet as a sentient being”. Twenty-five years on, it remains the most Bowie thing he ever did outside music — which is to say, it was about fifteen years ahead of everyone else.
The meeting in Wimbledon
The story of how Bowie got into a video game is now industry legend, and it begins with a refusal. In 1998, Quantic Dream’s David Cage travelled to the Wimbledon offices of publisher Eidos hoping simply to license the song “Heroes” for his studio’s first game. Bowie listened, and Cage has recalled the moment many times since: “No, I am not going to give you an old song,” Bowie said — and then, after a pause that must have felt eternal: “I am going to write an album for you guys.”
Cage, a former composer himself, had conceived Omikron back in 1994, writing its concept in his spare time. His composer wish list for the game had included Björk, Massive Attack and Archive alongside Bowie — and Bowie, the longest shot on the list, was the one who answered immediately and wanted, in Cage’s telling, to genuinely inhabit the virtual space. It is worth remembering the context: in 1998, rock stars did not write albums for unknown French developers. Games were still fighting for cultural legitimacy, and Bowie — who had launched his own internet service provider that same year — could see around the corner in a way the music industry plainly could not.
Boz, the Dreamers, and a month in motion capture
Bowie did not lend Omikron a song and a photo. He moved in. Over the course of a year he wrote eight songs for the game with his longtime guitarist Reeves Gabrels — material that fed directly into his 1999 album ‘hours…’, making Omikron effectively a Bowie album you could walk around inside. He spent a month in Paris being filmed in a motion-capture studio (his choreographer Edouard Locke supplied the signature moves Bowie modestly claimed not to have). And he played two roles.
The first is Boz: a revolutionary and cyber-pirate wanted by Omikron City’s authorities, who has transcended his body to become a virtual being — “the internet as a sentient being,” in Bowie’s own summary, a description that in 1999 was science fiction and now reads like a job posting. The second role is stranger and better: Bowie appears, alongside Gabrels and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, as the singer of The Dreamers, an illegal underground band performing his songs in bars across the city. Find the right bar at the right time and the game simply stops to let David Bowie play a gig. His wife Iman also appears in the game, as one of the citizens whose body the player’s wandering soul can inhabit.
A soul for rent: the game itself
For readers who never played it, The Nomad Soul’s premise deserves a proper summary, because it frames everything Bowie does in the game. Omikron City is a dystopia ruled by a demon, Astaroth, who harvests human souls through a front organisation; the player’s own soul is summoned across dimensions by a dying investigator named Kay’l, and becomes a “nomad soul” — able to survive its host’s death by leaping into another citizen’s body, provided that citizen has first permitted the transfer. Mechanically it was a possession system years before the idea became fashionable; narratively it let the game treat identity itself as gameplay. Bowie, playing a being who has discarded his body to live inside a network, is therefore not decoration in Omikron. He is the game’s thesis statement with a discography.
The Dreamers’ concerts complete the picture. These are not cutscene cameos: the band performs full Bowie songs — several of them the tracks he and Gabrels wrote for the game — in seedy bars scattered through the city, and the performances function in-world as illegal gatherings of the resistance-minded. Hunt down a gig and the dystopia briefly becomes a venue. It is impossible to imagine another major artist of Bowie’s stature agreeing in 1998 to be woven this deeply into a game’s fabric; most would have licensed a song and a likeness and left. Bowie stayed for a month of motion capture and a year of songwriting.
A game as ambitious as its guest star
Omikron itself was wildly ambitious for a debut: a sprawling adventure mixing exploration, first-person shooting, one-on-one fighting and puzzles, built around the soul-transfer mechanic that gives The Nomad Soul its name. Released for PC in 1999 and Dreamcast in 2000, it sold more than 600,000 copies — respectable, majority-European numbers — while planned PlayStation and PlayStation 2 versions were cancelled. A sequel, Nomad Soul: Exodus, never materialised. Quantic Dream went on to Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, but Omikron remains its oddest artefact: too strange to be a template, too personal to be a footnote.
January 2016: the giveaway
When Bowie died on 10 January 2016, aged 69, the gaming industry mourned him as one of its own — because, uniquely, he was. Five days after his death, Square Enix (which had acquired Eidos and offered Omikron digitally since 2013) announced a tribute: the game would be free for a week, until 22 January 2016, via its online stores, with the code “omikron” in North America. “In memoriam to David Bowie’s legacy,” the company wrote, “we are giving away free digital copies of his video game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul.” Thousands claimed it; many played Bowie’s game for the first time that week, in the middle of grieving him, which is about as fitting a memorial as interactive media has produced.
The game’s afterlife has been appropriately cultish. The Dreamcast version became a collector’s piece, the PC edition found a permanent home on digital storefronts, and Omikron’s reputation has steadily risen as its ideas — possession as progression, a city that reacts to your borrowed bodies, a celebrity collaborator woven into the fiction rather than pasted onto the box — have been rediscovered by newer games. David Cage’s later work made Quantic Dream famous for cinematic storytelling; Omikron is where that ambition started, at its rawest and weirdest, with rock’s greatest chameleon as its patron saint.
That is why this little post from the day after his death was worth rescuing and rewriting properly. Plenty of musicians licensed songs to games. Exactly one wrote an album for a game, acted two roles in it, let a virtual band perform his new material in its bars, and described himself as the sentient internet while doing it. The Nomad Soul is a flawed, fascinating game. It is also a time capsule of the moment David Bowie looked at this young medium, understood it faster than almost anyone in music — and climbed inside.