Microsoft's demonstration at E3 2009 of interaction with a small boy AI via Kinect prompted a great deal of curiosity and enthusiasm. That's why yesterday's comments from Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg -- later amended -- that the Lionhead Studios project was just "a tech demo"
drew so much attention.
Though ultimately Greenberg and Microsoft affirmed that "Project Milo" is indeed a real product in development, Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux is adding his voice to the discussion, using his talk at the GameHorizon developer event in the UK to reinforce the legitimacy of the project.
The Microsoft Game Studios Europe creative director is pegging yesterday's confusion on the difficulty in communicating its complexities to Microsoft: "I have real sympathy for the [Microsoft] people over in Redmond, because they understandably have some questions," he says.
"The biggest challenge for us is convincing people what we're doing is actually going to work, is going to reach a new audience, is going to be an idea that people love," said Molyneux,
as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. "That, for me, is a massive challenge; convincing people what you're doing is something that can change the world."
Molyneux has garnered something of a reputation for aiming high and talking big, but he indicates that Greenberg's initial comments came from simply having limited exposure to his project. "Poor Aaron Greenberg - he's on the PR team, he hasn't seen it since last year, so he came up with this stock answer that Milo is alive and well and living in Guildford but it's still a tech demo," he said.
Molyneux says Greenberg "hasn't seen the game since last year." He adds, "If I had spent time with him and showed him the game recently, he'd know what was going on.... All that technology that we showed at E3 last year actually does work."
According to the report, Molyneux plans to show updates on Milo at the TEDGlobal conference in two weeks, but that doesn't suggest release is near -- Milo "for sure" won't launch this year. In particular, Molyneux said that including the title among Kinect's launch lineup would be "inappropriate... it's using Kinect in a very different way which is very sensitive."
