Ever since the new Covid-19 variant Omicron was discovered, wild claims are being made on social media that Bill Gates and his company Microsoft were behind developing a popular 1990s videogame named 'Omikron'. However, the claim is completely false and baseless as Gates and Microsoft were no way related to the game.
Gates has often been linked to the Covid-19 pandemic by conspiracy theorists and this time he is being linked to the Omikron game with the claim that Gates planned and engineered the COVID-19 pandemic. It's true that there is a game called Omikron but in reality it has nothing to do with Gates or Microsoft.
Misleading Claim
Last month, an image captioned: "'Omicron' was the name of a 1999 video game by Microsoft – Bill Gates – about demons pretending to be humans and harvesting their souls" was shared on Facebook. The post was shared by a Facebook user named Scooty The Kid.
It was just days after the Omicron variant of the coronavirus was detected and soon went viral as many started believing in it. The post garnered over 1,200 interactions in just two days. Twitter users also shared the claim, and similar versions spread on TikTok.
The post was later taken off because it was false information, Facebook said but by that time it was already shared by 492 people and got 78 comments and it went viral. One Facebook commenter wrote, "Seriously?! Wow....just a coincidence tho."
The Truth
In reality, the game exists but Gates isn't the one who developed. The name of the original video game is "Omikron: The Nomad Soul." It was created by Quantic Dream and distributed by Eidos Interactive. It is also true that the game was first released in November 1999 on the Microsoft Windows platform and was not developed by Microsoft or Gates, as many social media posts imply.
Quantic Dream is a French videogame developer, while Microsoft is purely American. Quantic Dream, founded in Paris by David Cage.
So, Bill Gates is no way linked to this game neither did he nor his company develop it. It's only that the game was released on the Microsoft Windows platform's Dreamcast game console in 2020.
Moreover, the Omicron variant has nothing to do with the game. The video game is spelled with the letter "k" instead of "c". The Omicron variant of coronavirus, which first emerged in South Africa, is named after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. Similarly, the Delta variant is named after the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet.
Many started believing in the claim because just after the Facebook image started doing the rounds, Gates, during a seminar said that the Omicron variant of Covid-19 will "soon be in every country in the world."
However, fact is that the game Omikron wasn't developed by Gates and Microsoft and the claim is completely baseless and false.
