EIDOS INTERACTIVE AND DAVID BOWIE CHANGE FACE OF INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT
Announce Collaboration on Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a Break-Through PC Game Featuring the World's First 'Virtual Album'
SAN FRANCISCO -- May 12, 1999 -- 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�. Bowie and Reeves Gabrels, Bowie's collaborator and guitarist since 1989, worked closely with the game's developers, Paris-based Quantic Dream, to create original music for the game, including eight new songs. Bowie also plays the role of Boz, a character in the game, and appears along with Gabrels and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey in a virtual band, which performs in several bars in the massive Omikron city. Omikron: The Nomad Soul is a brilliant, strikingly-stylistic and futuristic 3D action-adventure game that Eidos is releasing on PC CD-ROM in October 1999. Omikron has been over two years in development and implements never-before-seen features such as facial motion capture in real-time. The game contains more than 400 different sets in four huge cities, 140 characters that move in 3D real time and four hours of dialogue.
The game features the first-ever virtual album, which characters in the game can purchase, take back to their virtual apartment and play. The music of Bowie and Gabrels is the perfect compliment to the atmosphere of the Omikron experience. "I moved right away from the stereotypical industrial game music sound," said Bowie. "My priority in writing music for Omikron was to give it an emotional subtext. It feels to me as though Reeves and I have achieved that." Omikron: The Nomad Soul introduces virtual reincarnation to the gaming world. In order to move around the city, the player must place his or her soul into the body of someone in Omikron. Whenever this body dies, the soul is transferred into the body of the first person who touches the dead body. Iman, the world-famous model and Bowie's wife, is featured as an 'incarnable' character in the game.
"Eidos' Omikron: The Nomad Soul is set to be a massive, leading-edge game," says Charles Cornwall, CEO of Eidos Plc. "David Bowie's involvement endorses the quality of the game and the fact that world-wide entertainment stars realize the value of the computer games market as an essential ingredient of the entertainment mix. Eidos Interactive, Inc. is a leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment products for the PC, PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and GameBoy Color. Eidos Interactive is part of London-based Eidos plc (NASDAQ: EIDSY) with additional offices in San Francisco, Paris, Hamburg, Singapore and Tokyo. For more information on Eidos Interactive's product line visit http://www.eidosinteractive.com
Source: Eidos
Wednesday, May 12, 1999