Lionhead's Milo "Product" for Kinect Still in Development, Not Out This Year

June 29, 2010 2:00 PM

Earlier today the fate of Lionhead Studios' Project Milo appeared to be sealed when Australia-based ABC "Good Game" posted a clip of Xbox product director Aaron Greenberg saying definitively that the virtual child would not be brought to "market."

"Last year we revealed the Project Natal technology and showed a bunch of technology demos as part of that," Greenberg said in the ABC video (skip to 0:40). "Right now it's not a game that we're planning to bring to market," he added. Today, however, Greenberg clarified his statements via Twitter saying, "Project Milo absolutely continues in development at Lionhead Studios, it is just not a product we plan to bring to market this holiday."

When pressed on Kinect functionality in Fable III during an E3 2010 roundtable discussion with journalists, Lionhead founder Peter Molyneux said there was a "really, really good reason why I can't talk about [Kinect functionality] and why I'm not allowed to talk about that. It's a very similar reason as to why I'm not talking about Milo." When word that Project Milo had been relegated to "tech demo" status began appearing online, Lionhead Studios' Sam Van Tilburgh tweeted a photo he dubbed "Team Milo."

According to Joystiq, Van Tilburgh could not definitively state whether Project Milo's status as a product as changed, he did say, "There's about 50 people on the 'Project Milo Team.'" In an interview with OXM UK, Microsoft's Phil Spencer said that the technology developed by Lionhead is being fed into other projects around Microsoft, specifically comparing the interaction between player and animal in the upcoming Kinectimals. "When you see the interaction between the girl and the animal [in Kinectimals] on stage you can see similarities to stuff we were working on with Milo, so we start with experiments and they may turn into games themselves," Spencer said.

When contacted for comment, a Microsoft representative referred Shacknews to Aaron Greenberg's aforementioned tweet as an official company statement regarding the status of Project Milo, along with a second tweet which read, "The team at Lionhead has always been a center of innovation and will continue to deliver against that charter."

Xav de Matos

Xav de Matos was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

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yaystuff

 reply
June 29, 2010 3:03 PM

"Right now it's not a game that we're planning to bring to market...and also the demo was fake anyways lol"
- the archvile
  
   reply
  June 29, 2010 4:08 PM
  
  Until about 5 minutes ago I had never seen the Milo demo. After seeing a short clip of it, it looks interesting, modeling a sort of audio-visual feedback loop, but I don't see how all of that could have been done on the fly without pre-canned phrases or at least a partial script or short story read by the "player" before the demonstration.
  - the archvile
    
     reply
    June 29, 2010 4:16 PM
    
    ...and at the same time, I can see how Kinectimals would be a better demo with less blemishes. By modeling an animal, there's no speech synthesis or recognition necessary, just a library of animal vocalizations. The only necessary feedback is restricted to those sounds and the visual animation cues.
    
    I don't want to go searching for a video of the Kinectimals demo, because when Garnett Lee imitated the girl saying "Oh, Skittles! That tickles!" I wanted to break something in the room out of exasperation due to annoyance.