David Bowie Was Almost in Original Amplitude

A character based on legendary British rockstar David Bowie, who recently passed away at the age of 69 from cancer, was almost featured in Harmonix's 2003 PS2 rhythm game Amplitude. Ryan Lesser, the art director at Harmonix at the time of Amplitude's release, made the revelation during a recent Reddit AMA.

He also shared a never-before-seen image of the Bowie character model (a work-in-progress version) and talked about why it ultimately didn't work out to add him to the game.

"David Bowie was a fan of Amplitude, and put one of his songs in the original game," Lesser said, referring to "Everyone Says 'Hi' (Metro Remix)."

"In addition, we made a Bowie 'FreQ' (the customizable characters in Amplitude OG)," Lesser said. "In the end, our tech did not allow us to prevent players from 'customizing' David Bowie's avatar, so it was removed from the game."

Lesser said Bowie's character model would have included a "cool suit," but unfortunately, that's not shown in the image here. If you want to see Bowie in cool clothing, check out this image gallery from GameSpot sister site CBS News.

Bowie died of cancer on January 10, just days after his 69th birthday and the release of his latest album.

Though Bowie didn't make it into Amplitude, he did appear in another game during the same era: Quantic Dream's Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

An Amplitude sequel was released this week for PlayStation 4, with a PlayStation 3 edition coming later. For more, check out GameSpot's review of the new game.