Lionhead Studios has Kinect watchers paying attention again. Behind the scenes footage from Peter Molyneux’s studio, built around the drama director of Project Milo and showing motion capture work in progress, has people wondering whether the team is warming up for a big moment at E3. With the show less than three months away, it is hard not to read the videos as a tease.
A word of caution before anyone books seats for Microsoft’s press conference. Neither Lionhead nor Microsoft has announced anything for E3, and the footage does not name a game, a release window or a platform beyond the Kinect work it shows. The E3 angle is informed speculation, not a promise.
Milo’s Long Road Since E3 2009
Still, the speculation has plenty to feed on. Milo first appeared at E3 2009, when Microsoft unveiled the motion sensing camera then known as Project Natal with a clip of Molyneux demonstrating a virtual boy who could react to a player’s voice and movements. By E3 2010 Milo had vanished from Microsoft’s briefing, and the company described it as an internal tech demo rather than something headed to stores. Engadget reported at the time that the Milo team numbered around 50 people and that no product would arrive that holiday.
Molyneux pushed back on that framing and showed more of Milo at TEDGlobal in Oxford last July, including a sequence where the boy learned to skip stones. In September, Eurogamer reported, citing an unnamed source, that work on Milo had stopped and that its technology was being folded into a Fable themed Kinect game. Then in November, Kinect creator Alex Kipman said Milo had never been a product and had never been announced as a game.
Signs That Lionhead Kept Working On Milo
Since then the signals have been getting stronger. The most revealing piece so far is a video featuring drama director John Dower, which surfaced on Vimeo at the end of February, with Dower explaining his goals for the technology alongside footage of the game Milo stars in. Earlier this month at the Game Developers Conference, lead programmer Ben Sugden showed off graphics technology from Milo that is being used for upcoming Xbox 360 titles. Taken together, the picture is of a studio that kept working on its ideas even after Milo was written off in public.
Lionhead’s most recent release was Fable III, which shipped on Xbox 360 last October, only weeks before Kinect launched. Kinect support never made it into that game, which left plenty of room for a dedicated motion controlled project from the studio. Whether that becomes a full Fable spinoff, a reborn Milo or something else entirely is anyone’s guess right now.
E3 takes place in Los Angeles in June. If Lionhead is planning a big moment there, footage like this is exactly how you would expect the build up to start.