Call it Project Milo. Call it Milo & Kate. Call it, last we heard, canceled. You can also call Lionhead Studios' attempt to use the Xbox 360 Kinect sensor array to let players interact with a virtual boy a more ambitious effort than anything else we've seen using Microsoft's popular new tech.
But we've seen so little of it, making a new seven-minute video about the game all the more fascinating. Drama director John Dower, who worked on Milo for three years, spends most of this new video, which just popped up online, discussing how he directed the real actor whose motion-captured movements became Milo's. Through that description, we get more hints about what the game was (is?) going to be like.
We already knew that a storyline had been grafted upon the Milo tech. The boy had recently moved to America with his parents but was lonely and felt disconnected from his parents. He would conjure an imaginary friend — the player — and develop a bond that could be shaped by how you play games with him, how he interprets your tone of voice and the choices you make together.
I didn't know, though, that Milo would be attacked by deer and that he might, as it seems from the video, lash out at the player. I didn't know about a lot of the actions hinted in this video.
The last official showing of the Milo game was last summer. John Dower talks in this video of having worked on the game for three years and speaks of that work in the past tense.
What will become of Milo and his tech? Who knows. What might we miss? This video shows.