Peter Molyneux Discusses What Happened to the Kinect Game Project Milo

by
William D’Angelo
, posted 5 hours ago / 546 Views

Peter Molyneux, the founder of now defunct studio Lionhead, speaking during the Nordic Game conference in Sweden discussed the never released Kinect game, Project Milo, and why it never released.

Molyneux revealed we has first shown Kinect by Microsoft engineer Alex Kipman with a demo and it had a field-of-view that could see the whole room and it had voice recognition.

“He said, ‘what do you think?’, and I said, ‘well, firstly’ – when he did the demo, he was jumping all over the room – ‘I’m a gamer, I don’t want to play games standing up. That’s the first thing,” said Molyneux (via GamesIndustry).

“It doesn’t appeal to me, I want to sit back, I want to smoke what I smoke, and I want to drink what I want to drink, and I don’t want to prance around like a twat’. I said, ‘I’ll go away and I’ll create a demo of [how we should use] the technology you showed me.’

“Again, I go back to what I want the player to feel. Now, at that time, my son, Lucas, was about seven years old. And, anyone who’s a parent will probably experience this: there was this moment where you realise you’re crafting, inspiring, a human being. Wouldn’t it be an incredible thing to create a game around that feeling?”

He added, “Wouldn’t it be incredible to create an experience around that? About inspiring, in Milo’s case, a boy. That was contentious in itself, because of course, lots of people go to the dark side with that [idea].”

Molyneux stated Lionhead began working on the demo alongside an unnamed technology company on Project Milo’s voice recognition.

“We had all sorts of experiences, like you could hand things to Milo in the game world and he would take them. They really worked well.”

He revealed the team “cheated in a big way about how you could talk to Milo” and the goal was to have players sit on a couch and “just experience things with this game character.”

“Even though voice recognition now is almost a solved problem, back in those days we solved the problem by cheating,” Molyneux said. “So, when Milo asked you the player a question, we had set that question up to different points, so he knew what sort of answer he’d give.”

Molyneux revealed the specs for Kinect kept changing in its run up to launch as the original device would have cost $5,000 for consumers.

“Unfortunately, as we were developing Milo, so the Kinect device was being developed. And they realised that the device that Alex Kipman first showed off would cost $5,000 for consumers to buy. So they cost-reduced that device down to such a point, where the field-of-view…I think it was a minuscule field-of-view. In other words, it could only just see what’s straight in front of you.”

He concluded, “Then, the death blow of Milo, which still breaks my heart to this day, was that it was decided that Kinect shouldn’t be a gaming device: it should be a party device. You should play a sports game with it, or dancing games with it. So, it just didn’t fit into the Microsoft portfolio, and unfortunately the project was cancelled.

“No one ever saw the complete experience. We didn’t finish the experience. But it was a magical thing. What was so magical about it: it wasn’t about heroes and aliens coming down, there wasn’t this ‘end of the world’ narrative scenario. It was just experiencing what it’s like to hang out with someone that loves you.”

A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.