David Bowie Lives On | Omikron: The Nomad Soul

The 90's weren’t incredibly kind to David Bowie. Though he continued to work through a new phase in his career, seeking to constantly reinvent the artistic spirit that fueled him lest he be overcome by the ghosts of personas past, the hits just weren’t there. I suspect there will be more appreciation for albums from this period in coming years, but as of right now, they are remembered fondly mostly by the Bowie faithful.

But this isn’t about that. This is about the time I saw David Bowie live.

I was tired. Cramped. My head lurched over my shoulders uncomfortably, a strain reaching through my neck and down through my back. My face, underdeveloped jawline and all, hung still as I stared at a small window on my monitor. I had been through, for several hours now, the painful process of installing and managing a virtual machine on my personal computer. It’s a program of sorts that emulates the functions of another computer but, and here’s the cool bit, you can run a different operating system on it. I was staring down the boot logo for Windows 98, embossed over top of my actual desktop and the default wallpaper for Windows XP. 2004 was a very strange time.

I’d gone through this lengthy, painfully unintuitive process so that I could visit Omikron.

I stumbled across a Wikipedia article that had told me about Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a game where every death is real and every resurrection comes with a new form. In the game, you do not play as inhabitants of that world, but as yourself — a nomadic soul moving from body to body trying to solve some great mystery. I had to play it but would have to do some legwork.

David Bowie portrays two characters within Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a video game from 1999 that is incredibly strange and awkward. One of these characters is a musician who sings with a band within the game and performs songs written by the actual Bowie and collaborator Reeves Gabrels. Some of the tracks on the Omikron soundtrack were modified or skeletal versions of what would later make up 1999’s Hours….

The other is a digital god-man that you end up trying to help as part of the game’s primary objectives. They are separate entities, entirely independent of one another, that both happen to sound and look like David Bowie. Because they were portrayed, virtually, by the Thin White Duke himself.

Omikron never worked quite right for me. Which, as I’ve said, was to be expected at that point in time. However, I was able to struggle my way through parts of the story. And a large reason I did this was to see what exactly it was that David Bowie did in the game. The idea of a famous person contributing to the creation and direction of a game was fascinating to me. And because it was Bowie, the fascination was hand in hand with excitement.

So there I was, staring at a window in a window, glow of an early 2000s monitor the only light on my face. I hunched, listened to the faint audio I managed to eke out of the program, and sat uncomfortably in my room waiting for David Bowie.

Then he appeared. And sang. And thanked me for attending his illegal concert. Then the game crashed.

That was in 2004. Seventeen years later, Omikron: The Nomad Soul is readily available through digital distribution and for a price low enough to help justify the technical headaches players can and will face. In many ways, the game is a perfect encapsulation of the shortcomings of preservation in this industry. While one can purchase and install the game, there are extra steps to be taken to get it working. Is that something the average consumer is going to put up with? Absolutely not. And, as a result, plenty of games from yesteryear are available for purchase in unplayable states. That’s to say nothing of the hundreds more that languish in obscurity due to licensing or technical issues and will never see a rerelease short of some miracle.

There are a lot of games featuring other musical talent that fall into this category. Queen’s Myst-like The eYe, Peter Gabriel’s Eve, and the Paisley Park adventure Prince Interactive to name the ones on my personal wish list. But what Omikron has that none of those do is that it’s a game first, multimedia presentation second. The advent of the CD-ROM let a lot of artists both in and out of the music industry experiment with virtual spaces, but none have the panache of Bowie’s turn in Omikron. While he may not be the centerpiece of the cyberpunk-inspired action-adventure, its position as an interactive experience makes his role in it stand out all the more. While one could click endlessly around Myst-derivative adventures and find aging rock stars wielding their influence, you could attend a Bowie concert within Omikron. The man spoke to you, in a way, and you could watch him move around in this actual world with all the fidelity 1999 could allow.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that concert lately. About how the limited ability to convincingly animate a human body in those days lead to frightening gyrations and vibrations that now, to me, echo the priest of Blackstar and, much more hauntingly, Lazarus. I wonder if Bowie knew that what he was doing and what he was contributing to was destined to be another footnote in his artistic history, as so many of his projects at that time were. That it would not break the streak and catapult him back into the mainstream’s glittering eyes.

And I wonder especially if anyone ever told him that what he did then and there, immortalized in a way as the nameless lead singer of the Dreamers, was worthwhile. That even though it did not bring critical or commercial attention back, it stuck, or would stick, to some minds. That somewhere, years later, a kid he’d never meet had seen that and marveled in the same way legions of people had at countless concerts over the decades preceding.

Maybe somebody did. I hope so.