Veteran game developer, Peter Molyneux was in demand back in the early 2000s. Not only did the man release various popular IPs like Black and White, but he also worked closely with Microsoft during the company’s Kinect development.
One career standout moment for Molyneux was the reveal of Project Milo. The project was showcased during the Xbox Kinect reveal back in 2009, where Molyneux shared how the Kinect was able to interact with users and blend the living room and digital world together using the camera.
The demo showed a lady interacting with Milo, a sad-looking boy who was seemingly cheered up by the conversation he had with the player. While the demo does come across quite staged, people were impressed by the potential of the Kinect and Molyneux’s stance on it.
But it seems the developer didn’t care much for Kinect after all. In an interview, he revealed that Kinect wasn’t his cup of tea. He says that the tech offered some “incredible” opportunities for games, but the majority of these games were movement and party games, of which he wasn’t too keen on.
Molyneux says that the original demo he had with the Kinect when Microsoft presented the tech to studios saw him “jumping all over the room”. It didn’t sit well with him;
‘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.”
So instead of following the rest of the world by making movement games, Molyneux took inspiration from his seven-year-old son and developed Project Milo. He says that the game was originally meant to offer an experience where you’d interact with an inspiring human being.
“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? 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.”
But while Project Milo showed promise, the game was eventually impossible to make due to how “downgraded” the consumer version of Kinect ended up being. Molyneux claims that the original Kinect prototype had much more tech crammed into it and the overall hardware was worth $5,000. Of course, this was all cost-reduced to make it accessible to consumers and eventually, Project Milo just didn’t work as it was intended.
“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,” he explained. “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. 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.”
Source: GI.biz
