With Peter Molyneux’s exit from Lionhead, I had only one thing on my mind. Project Milo. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Was it real? My mind was racing with questions and excitement about the future of gaming. The girl in the video appeared to be speaking with a living, breathing emotional kid through the Kinect (named Natal at the time). You could ask him questions, play fake catch with him, and even hand him a picture of something you drew. Personally, I was creeped out about playing with a 8 year old human giga pet, but amazed that it can even be done.
Then we got the news from Microsoft that this was just a tech demo, showing what could be possible with Kinect. Peter confirmed Milo was in fact real, maybe the end goal was just too much handle or Microsoft didn’t feel it was worth the investment. If Milo couldn’t be successful as a whole at least Lionhead made some cool developments in the process of trying. Supposedly there is some cool “emotion” technology coming to Kinect games soon according to Wikipedia.
In the end, I think gamers forgetting about Milo was a blessing to Microsoft. That was a pretty high bar set by Peter and we have yet to see anything close to it. All those conversations about how real GTA and fighting games would be with Kinect has sadly faded to black. It was cool to dream about it though.
