Kinect creator Alex Kipman reveals it was ”never announced as a game,” as it was more of a ‘tech sandbox’. Milo’s core has ”migrated” to Kinectimals.
For a while now there’s been confusion surrounding a possible retail future for Milo & Kate, with Lionhead and Molyneux offering a glimmer or two of hope but Microsoft more or less dismissing the project as a glorified technology demo for Kinect.
”Milo was never announced as a game,” said Microsoft’s Alex Kipman.
”Peter Molyneux is probably one of the most amazing people I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with. So, there’s the world of creating paint colours and paintbrushes - that’s me. Then there’s the world of creating pictures based on these paint colours and paintbrushes - that’s Peter Molyneux, it’s a give and take. It’s a partnership.”
”Peter comes to me and says, you know what Alex, there are these stories I’ve always wanted to tell, if only I had these paint colours and paintbrushes. And I say to Peter, ‘I have a new selection of paints and paintbrushes - what can you paint with it?’”
”You see how these things interchange with each other and then collectively we come up with these transformational, revolutionary experiences. Milo was a sandbox. In this world of creating experiences I used voice, gestures, identity together,” he continued.
”Milo was the sandbox which allowed us to define how to do these experiences, and what you saw was a transformational experience where you got a level of emotional connection unlike anything you had seen before.”
The fundamentals of what Lionhead and Microsoft wanted to see accomplished have been adopted by Kinectimals, points out Kipman. ”Now, where has Milo gone? It was never really a product,” he said. Molyneux said in August he’d try to get it released.
”I will tell you that the technology developed in that sandbox, and by the way we continue to develop technologies in that sandbox, has migrated pretty closely to what you see in a game called Kinectimals.”
”Kinectimals is about creating an emotional, deep relationship between you and this tiger cub. It uses identity, knows who you are. It actually reacts differently when you walk in front of it, because it’s your tiger, than when I walk in front of it, because it doesn’t know me.”
”It uses voice, so that you can interact with it and play with it, it uses gestures and essentially moves you to this deep adventure on an island where you’re finding the secret of a pirate in much the same way as a traditional adventure type game.”
”This is one of what I would say was one of the key innovations, that captured people’s minds with Milo - this idea that we could create an emotion engine, an engine that would fuse these human input behaviours and create a relationship with this imaginary character. What I think you see in Kinectimals is precisely that,” said Kipman.
Kinect and its launch titles like Kinectimals are now out in the US with the motion camera due for release in the UK and Europe next week on November 10th.
