Peter Molyneux explains why his infamous Kinect game Project Milo was never released

Peter Molyneux has shed new light on how his unreleased Xbox 360 Kinect experiment Project Milo came about, and why it ultimately never saw the light of day.

During the Nordic Game conference in Sweden this week, former Bullfrog and Lionhead founder Molyneux was asked during a Q&A what happened to Project Milo (also known as Milo & Kate), which had players using Kinect’s camera and microphone to talk to a young boy.

According to Molyneux (as reported by GamesIndustry.biz), when Kinect was first shown to him by Microsoft engineer Alex Kipman, the device had a huge field-of-view which could see the entire room, and while Molyneux thought it was “incredible” he didn’t want to use it for energetic party-like games.

“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,”” Molyneux recalled. “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.”

Deciding to think of a more sedentary way to make use of Kinect, Molyneux took inspiration from his 7-year-old son Lucas and the way that children at that age are particularly receptive to taking on new information.

“Anyone who’s a parent will probably experience this,” he explained. “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 [idea].”

Molyneux then went into more detail on the development of the game – including how they got around the voice recognition by ‘cheating’, whereas today it’s “almost a solved problem” with the likes of AI chatbots – before explaining why it was ultimately never released.

According to Molyneux, the first blow was that the Kinect shown to him was eventually downgraded significantly, affecting the possibilities for the game.

“Unfortunately, as we were developing Milo, so the Kinect device was being developed,” he said. “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.”

The final death knell for Project Milo in Molyneux’s eyes, however, was when Microsoft decided to market Kinect as a party device rather than a gaming device, something he had already colourfully explained he wasn’t in favour of.

“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.”

Molyneux concluded that nobody ever “saw the complete experience” because Project Milo was ultimately never finished. “But it was a magical thing,” he said.

“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.”