When David Bowie starred in a quirky video game that you may have forgotten

2 March 2026, 11:51 | Updated: 2 March 2026, 12:00

David Bowie was always doing things a little bit differently.

David Bowie had his ups and downs in the 1980s.

He went from some of his biggest commercial hits (Let's Dance) to his critical low point (Never Let Me Down). From the Kid-friendly fare of Labyrinth to self-consciously adult grunge rock of Tin Machine.

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At the start of the next decade he decided to take stock, and announced his Sound+Vision tour.

It supposedly marked the retirement of his Greatest Hits (though it didn't quite do that), but it very much drew a dividing line.

David Bowie in the 1990s stopped caring about what anyone thought and jumped headfirst back into wildly experimental waters.

The funked up sounds of Black Tie White Noise, the quirky storytelling of 1. Outside and the pop jungle mashup of Earthling all followed.

And by the end of the decade, David Bowie had worked on what may have been his strangest ever project: a video game called Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

Composer turned director David Cage had written a 200-page impossible script called The Nomad Soul.

He got together a gaggle of friends and in six months developed a game engine and prototype, impressing Eidos Interactive enough to sign a deal.

The ambitious project aimed to include multiple perspectives offering up "a movie-like experience - with total immersion".

David Bowie's Omikron: A Misunderstood Video Game

Cage already had a list of major names he wanted to tap up for musicians to work with - among them Björk, Massive Attack, Archive, and David Bowie.

It was Eidos's senior designer Philip Campbell Eidos who pushed for Bowie to be the one, and David didn't just serve up some instrumental noodling, but threw himself into the project.

That meant coming up with ten proper songs, written together with Tin Machine man Reeves Gabrels.

"Firstly, we sat down and wrote songs with just guitar and keyboard before going into the studio" Gabrels said.

"Secondly, the characters we appear as in the game, performing the songs, are street/protest singers and so needed a more singer-songwriter approach.

"And lastly, it was the opposite approach from the usual cheesy industrial metal music one would normally get."

Bowie himself echoed that desire to get away from "the stereotypical industrial game music sound".

"My priority in writing music for Omikron was to give it an emotional subtext," he said. "It feels to me as though Reeves and I have achieved that."

As well as appearing as an in-game band alongside Gabrels and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, Bowie nipped to Paris for a fortnight to help them base a major character on him, Boz, leader of The Awakened.

His wife Iman also provided her likeness, playing a bodyguard you could hire.

The Nomad Soul : The Dreamers concert Qualisar "Survive" (David Bowie)

So, what sort of game was Omikron: The Nomad Soul?

Look, we'll do our best to explain, but really you have to play it for yourself. 150 characters. 400 different environments. Four city locations.

We'll call it a 3D adventure game, but it was also a bit of a supernatural murder mystery with armed/unarmed combat element that flits between third and first person.

Oh, and if your character dies, it's reincarnated into one of 40 other previously non-playing characters, depending on who was nearest.

"It's fascinating and advanced," Bowie said of the game.

"It won't be long, I think, before video games have the same appeal as the cinema, once they begin involving more screenwriters, people who work with story and character."

David Bowie scenes in Omikron Nomad Soul

Called The Nomad Soul in Europe (and Omikron: The Nomad Soul in the US), the game was released first for Microsoft Windows machines in November 1999. It was ported over to the Sega Dreamcast in June 2000.

In Europe, it was pretty successful, or certainly not a total flop, selling 400,000 to 500,000 copies in the territory.

But its total sales were not much more than 600,000, and despite being three-quarters finished, a PlayStation and PlayStation 2 version was cancelled.

The fast-moving nature of PC gaming and the death of the Dreamcast (the last ever Sega console) meant that the game didn't have quite the direct impact it could have. A planned sequel never happened.

David Bowie Something In The Air (Omikron)

But it still had one hell of a legacy.

Director David Cage go on to make the acclaimed best-sellers Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls with his Quantic Dream company.

David Bowie would rework his Nomad Soul soundtrack into a proper album.

Released in September 1999 ahead of the video game, 'hours...' was Bowie's 22nd studio album and his most conventional since at least Black Tie White Noise. It went to number 5 on the UK charts.

Seven of its ten songs originated in Omikron, while some of the instrumentals Bowie and Gabrels wrote for the game were developed into the album's B-sides.

And while the game was forgotten by many, it always had its acolytes, and for all its twiddly controls and frankly bewildering story, it was an endlessly imaginative project – something gamers will always appreciate.

Fans will still play the game on their PCs or via emulators, and after Bowie's sad death in 2016, it was made available as a free download for a week.

Be it with his ISP BowieNet to his guest spot on SpongeBob SquarePants and his Blackstar swansong, David Bowie kept on pushing boundaries and defying expectations till the very end.