I met David for the first time in 1998. It was in Wimbledon, in the offices of the publisher of my first video game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul. We were looking for a musical collaboration with a prestigious artist and I had been asked to make a short-list of artists that I would dream of working with. Bowie was, of course, number one on my list, although no one seriously thought we could even talk to him. We sent him a nice letter anyway … who knows? … and to our huge surprise, his manager answered that he could be interested and wanted to meet.
So here we are in this nice office waiting for David Bowie in a meeting room, not knowing what to expect. I will always remember the minute he came in the room. He had an incredible aura, something I had never seen before or since then. He was very nice and friendly, apologized for being ten minutes late because of the traffic, and introduced us to his “video game specialist”, his son Duncan Jones (he would later become a talented director).
I had been briefed that Mr. Bowie would only have 20 minutes, and that I would have to be very concise. I had been working on the game night and day for two years; I had hundreds of pieces of artwork, thousands of pages of script, some 3D sets running on a PC, and I had no clue how I could share all the ideas, and the passion and enthusiasm I had for this project, in 20 minutes. Fortunately, the meeting went on for two and a half hours. Bowie listened with a lot of attention, looked at everything we showed him, and asked some relevant questions.
At the end of the meeting, he asked me, “All this sounds very exciting, what do you expect from me?” All we wanted was the rights to use his song “Heroes”, which would have been a fantastic asset for the game and an immense honor for a young studio like Quantic Dream (or any studio, actually). Bowie stayed silent for a second and finally answered, “No, I am not going to give you an old song,” there was tremendous disappointment in the room, “I am going to write an album for you guys.” We were all looking at each other, not sure we understood him right and wondering if he was serious. “Tell me what else I could do for you,” he said. Well, we needed instrumental soundtracks for the game, and it would be amazing to have David Bowie be a character in the game. We shook hands and wondered if all this was true or if we had all dreamed it.
