David Cage, who later became famous for several games at Quantic Dream (most recently Detroit: Become Human), started his directorial career with this game.
Mojo, a music publication, published a retrospective of the game in 1999, which also featured David Bowie (who played the character of Boz). Initially, it was just a matter of licensing some of his older songs for use in the game, but he was so enthusiastic about the project that he ended up playing a character and writing twelve new original songs for the soundtrack! Phil Campbell, Lead Designer of Omikron: The Nomad Soul, told Mojo. He was working for Eidos at the time, which helped Quantic Dream realize the concept. The licensing meeting ended up bringing more people together… and for two weeks, Bowie was in a Paris apartment with the developers!
“David Cage’s list of bands was Björk, Radiohead, Future Sound Of London, Garbage. I threw Bowie in there because I’d been in the fan club since I was 11: and I knew he would complement the world we were creating. He loved David Cage’s vision for Omikron. That you get sucked into this world, the themes of oppression and awakening, and he loved the visuals of art director Loïc Normand. The next meeting he brought in Iman and Joe Duncan Jones. Then he brought in guitarist and Bowie collaborator Reeves Gabrels,” Campbell said.
Bowie’s larger role in the project led to the creation of a virtual band, The Dreamers. They performed three times in the game. Boz became a living hologram who was part of the resistance. Bowie had never experienced motion capture, so having his face digitized was a new experience for him. Except that most of the sales were in Europe (about 600,000) because the press in America didn’t bite on the game. Even though David Letterman held a box of the game on a talk show, it didn’t get people’s attention, and Bowie might have been a little upset about that. He ended up using his soundtrack work on his 1999 album Hours. The theme song was used as the basis for his recording of New Angels of Promise. Bowie also became interested in technology. He wanted to buy some satellites and re-launch Ziggy Stardust from space…
Bowie’s 1999 interview is also worth remembering. He said then that his primary goal in the game was to look 24 years old, and it took him weeks of concepts to find it. He also talked about how he got into computers, how he came up with the idea for a game soundtrack, and who in his family played games at the time:
“The idea of developing a soundtrack idea for a game is really quite unusual. The idea of writing songs specifically for a game was really a compelling factor and the only thing we wanted to do. They didn’t give us a preconceived idea of what to do, we were left to our own devices. I was the first artist to take computers on the road in the very early 80’s, the Serious Moonlight tour in 1983, and we were going online at that time and bringing all the facts and figures back to home base. I’ve been working on the Internet for about two years now, actually six months in operation, and I’ve been producing art on the computer since 1994, that’s when I did my first series of things. So I can move around with the mouse.
My son is the game dealer in our household. I’ve played games, of course I’ve played Tomb Raider, and like any other hot-blooded male I fell in love with Lara… for a moment, then I realized it’s not real, it’s just not real, and this is definitely the end of the millennium. What we’re trying to do more than anything else is give the game an emotional heart. The one thing that I found in the games that I looked at before we started working on this was that a lot of games have a cold emotional drive. I think the one thing we noticed immediately is that most of the material used in games is taken from albums. Very rarely is the music actually produced with the game. They’ve taken an album track here and an album track there, and sometimes it kind of works,” Bowie said.
The idea is still unique today.
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