death

Vapourware can end up being the stuff of legend, like Rockstar’s Agent, Star Wars 1313, or StarCraft: Ghost. Without ever seeing the light of day, these games never risked the possibility of being played and forgotten, and instead live on forever as the subjects of lengthy YouTube essays.

Peter Molyneux, formerly of the studios Bullfrog and Lionhead, and currently working on Masters of Albion at 22cans, has had a number of cancelled projects in his career. The original Xbox’s prehistoric game BC was axed around the time Fable became Lionhead’s priority, for example.

Still, Molyneux’s most notable lost game (or tech demo, depending on who you asked at the time) was arguably Project Milo.

Revealed alongside the Kinect device at E3 2009, which was then known as Project Natal, players would interact with a young male character called Milo using voice and gesture commands.

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This unusual premise made the game a huge talking point. The project was revealed just as traditional game genre boundaries were starting to blur following the success of the Nintendo DS and Wii.

The actual game based on the tech demo was to be called Milo & Kate, with Molyneux demoing it in more detail at a TED presentation in 2010. Lionhead’s stylistic touches are obvious throughout the demo, like its tone, music, narration, and choice of story about a British family that’s recently moved to America.

Molyneux described the game at the time by saying, “most of it is just a trick; but it’s a trick that works”.

The game ultimately didn’t release, with some of its ideas rolled into Fable: The Journey on Xbox 360, which was not well-received. Still, the demo arguably did its job, putting Microsoft’s Kinect device at the centre of the cultural conversation for its reveal, a full 17 months before it was commercially available.

Fable: The Journey ended up being the final Lionhead game before the studio’s closure in 2016.

While the broad details (and many specifics, per a 2013 Polygon piece) of Project Milo’s demise are fairly well-known, it was undeniably exciting to hear Molyneux himself recall the project during Nordic Game 2025 in Malmö this week.

During the Q&A section of his fireside chat, one attendee asked about Milo, saying they believed that to this day, Molyneux had a vision for what it could’ve been.

“I’ll tell you exactly what happened,” Molyneux said. “Microsoft had [bought] us, we were owned by Microsoft, and they had…I’m going to say this, I might get in trouble…what I thought was a bit of a crazy idea. And that was to do gesture recognition as an input device, rather than a controller. They showed me this stuff, and Microsoft had this amazing research building. Incredible.

“It was run by this brilliant bloke called Alex Kipman. Makes me look boring and passionless – he had ten times more passion than I had. He had this demo of this device, and when he showed me this demo, it could see people’s faces. He said, ‘it can do voice recognition’, and it had a massive field-of-view so it could see this whole room.”

Molyneux then recalled his first reaction to the tech that would eventually become Kinect.

“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. 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’.

“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”

Peter Molyneux

“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,” Molyneux continued. “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?”

Molyneux’s phone then started ringing during the panel, and he paused to turn it off before continuing.

“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 then said staff at Lionhead started working on the demo, collaborating with 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.”

Molyneux then said the team “cheated in a big way about how you could talk to Milo”, recalling that his intention was to have players sit back on the sofa 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.”

At this point, Molyneux explained how the changing specs of the Kinect device in the run up to launch impacted the potential of Project Milo.

“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.”

Ultimately, the demise of Project Milo came down to Microsoft’s changing priorities with the Kinect device, which was soon synonymous with the kinds of casual games that exploded in popularity on the Wii.

“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,” Molyneux continued. “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.”

GamesIndustry.biz is a media partner of Nordic Game 2025. Travel and accommodation were covered by the organisers.

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