The Making Of: Omikron: The Nomad Soul
French game developer David Cage isn’t enjoying his trip on the London Underground. It’s 1998 and he’s southbound on the District Line. Destination: Wimbledon, home to the Lawn Tennis Association and also, more importantly, the HQ of Eidos Interactive. In a backpack he carries a PC – a monster of a machine, powerful enough to run the demo of his passion project Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
Cage is, understandably, on edge. The rig on his shoulder is heavy, but his hopes weigh heavier still. He desperately needs this to go well; across the Channel, Cage’s start-up company Quantic Dream is running out of time.
Omikron began with an impossible vision. Cage, a professional musician with a background in commercials, wrote an initial, 200-page concept document outlining the kind of game he wanted to play.
“I was dreaming of a game with an open-world city where I could go wherever I wanted, meet anybody, use vehicles, fight and transfer my soul into another body,” he tells us. “When my friends read it they said: ‘David, this is impossible. It’s not technically feasible, don’t even think about it.’”
Visionaries don’t waste time wringing their hands over something as passé as feasibility, however. It didn’t matter to Cage that PC 3D cards were still in their infancy. He took the money he’d made from scoring commercials, hired a team of six friends with development experience and started production in a sound-proofed studio that once belonged to Belgian singer Jacques Brel. There were thick doors, no windows and everyone was crammed into a 15m square space.
Cage insisted on paying the team, not for altruistic reasons, but so that he could be the boss. “I wanted to be able to demand something of them, ask them to be there on time in the morning and work long days.” They went into instant crunch mode, having just six months to make the impossible demo; if they didn’t finish it before then, Cage would be broke and the dream would be over.
In the penultimate week of development, Cage got on the phone and asked publishers in the UK if they were interested in seeing his realtime 3D demo. Eidos said yes and when John Kavanagh, the VP of product development, saw the impossible demo with its dynamic city environment and motion-captured, canoodling pedestrians he signed Quantic Dream immediately – just three days before Cage’s start-up money ran out.
Omikron: The Nomad Soul showcases more ideas in its first ten minutes than most games achieve in their entire duration. Released in November 1999, two years before Grand Theft Auto III popularised the 3D open-world concept, Omikron invited players into an awe-inspiringly dynamic, futuristic city. It also featured a story about demons, hell and the transmigration of souls. “It’s the world’s first Buddhist game,” quips Phil Campbell, who was then senior designer at Eidos. “Buddhist with guns, I call it.”
Set in a totalitarian city ruled by a supercomputer and replete with RoboCop-style satirical ads (“Drink Quanta Cola, the energising drink with radioactive quanta extract”, the game possessed a subversive, cyberpunk edge. Imagine The Fifth Element crossed with Liberty City and a dash of Parisian red-light district Pigalle: among the supermarkets, temples and libraries are strip clubs populated by kabuki-faced pole dancers and sex shops crammed with dildos. The subversive quality seeps into the story too: starting out as a cop interrogating enemies of the state, you eventually join the resistance. One avatar’s terrorist is another avatar’s freedom fighter.
“There were many new ideas, probably too many,” admits Cage. “I wanted to mix different genres but I wouldn’t say we were 100 per cent successful.” Seesawing between adventure game, RPG, firstperson shooter, 3D fighting game, and the odd bit of driving, Omikron was about ten games in one.
It didn’t always work, not least the switches between third- and firstperson perspectives for the awkward shooting sequences. “I’m in the 15 per cent of people who can’t play games in firstperson because I get sick,” Cage explains. “Initially we wanted to have the shooting in thirdperson because firstperson gives me headaches and we didn’t think it fit with the style of the game. But Half-Life was very successful at the time and Eidos really pushed for firstperson. I think it was a mistake.”
Flawed as it might have been, it was flawed genius. Campbell, who’d later leave Eidos to join Quantic Dream as its chief creative officer, was among those who were wowed by Cage’s vision. “I went out with him at E3 and got him drunk, worming my way onto the project,” he recalls. “We invented an alter-ego for David, calling him ‘Foggy.’ It was primarily intended to start the cult of ‘David Cage’!”
More here: Link