In a dingy Omikron club, David Bowie lives.

This piece originally appeared in the first iteration of The Year 200X on January 13, 2016.

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 some new 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.

Thanks to services like GOG and Steam, both of which sell Omikron now, this sort of problem isn’t so commonplace anymore. But in the early 2000s, if you wanted to play an old PC game, you were in for a lot of headaches and, most likely, ultimate failure. Without turning this into a piece wistfully reminiscing over the hardships of PC gaming’s youth, I want to get back to Bowie.

David Bowie portrays two characters within Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a video game from 1999 that is incredibly strange and doesn’t hold up very well. One of these characters is a performer who sings with a band within the game and actually performs songs Bowie came up with, or at least an album that had yet to be recorded (a lot of Hours… is slightly modified material from the Omikron sessions). 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.

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 back then. And because it was Bowie, I was much more interested.

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.

I never went back to Omikron. I’ve meant to for a long time now that it is commercially available in a stable condition. I suppose I will now, considering the circumstances. But I’ve been thinking a lot about that concert now. 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 then, he 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.

And I wonder especially, now with tears I admit, if anyone ever told him that what he did then and there, immortalized in a way as the nameless lead singer of that band, was worthwhile. That it stuck, or would stick, to some minds. That somewhere, years later, a kid he’d never meet had seen that and really appreciated it, even if just for a bit at first.

Maybe somebody did. I hope so.

David Cole is a poet and writer from Wayne County, Kentucky who has spent his entire life playing games. His work focuses on the strange and powerful connections we feel to media and celebrities, including his breakout collection I’ve Been A Prisoner All My Life (And I Can Say To You).