Lionhead’s Project Milo helped launch Microsoft’s vision of Kinect to the world at E3 2009. Interact believably with a human AI using only gestures and voice!
Project Milo was the embodiment of Kinect’s science fiction potential.
But Lionhead said today that Project Milo existed long before Kinect – then Project Natal – was doing the rounds.
“Project Milo was something in development before we’d even heard of Kinect,” Lionhead’s creative director Gary Carr revealed at the Brighton Develop conference today.
“It was a controller game.
“Nobody knows that.”
What exactly Project Milo was – game or tech demo – was debated for months after that E3 reveal. That little idea had become a big headline.
“We played around with this for a while, and it suddenly got a lot of press coverage,” Carr said of Project Milo. “It wasn’t necessarily a game, it was an experiment. It kind of got a life of its own for a while.
“But we stopped work on it, because really we needed to start thinking about making some money as a studio.
“Project Milo was something in development before we’d even heard of Kinect. It was a controller game. Nobody knows that.”
Gary Carr, creative director, Lionhead
“Microsoft is very kind to let us beaver away on cool ideas,” Carr added, “but we cost a lot of money. So we decided to stop work on that and put it to something else, which was Fable: The Journey.”
Work on Project Milo stopped in September 2010. In October, Molyneux, Carr and a few other people dreamt up Fable: The Journey, and started doing “quick, dirty” prototypes – a technique picked up from Kinectimals developer Frontier.
The progress made on Project Milo didn’t go to waste, either. A water bomb mechanic went on to become the magic system of Fable: The Journey.
“We had these kind of wet balloon games in Milo & Kate where you fill balloons full of water and throw them into the world,” revealed Carr. “And we just basically migrated that technology and made it look like magic.”