How Milo met Kate: The story behind Lionhead's virtual boy

After four years in development, Dimitri had stalled. Lionhead had pulled away staff to help with its thriving Fable franchise, and Dimitri was lower on the company's priority list.

But some felt there was still potential in the Dimitri ideas, so in 2005 a small group formed to take a new approach. A new setting ("Eden Falls," based on Astoria, Ore. where Richard Donner filmed The Goonies), a new time period (the '80s) and a focus on realism that would allow players to simulate their own life. Given the changes in this reboot, some on the team took to calling the project "Eden Falls," after the setting, though officially it was still Dimitri.

"It's a game about ... you," Molyneux teased in a 2005 interview with website CVG. "It allows anyone who plays the game to relive their life, their entire individual life. That's a pretty ambitious concept."

Looking back at that quote now, team members agree with his sentiment, but say to take the word "entire" metaphorically rather than literally. Players would customize their character, then drop into their senior year of high school to live out their "coming of age" story: hang out with friends, fall in love and stumble into adventures.

The team prototyped a branching conversation system with dialogue and body language options, and began work on early gameplay tests. One scene involved the player waiting outside a store, asking an adult passing by to buy them beer. Another involved the player talking to the school's football coach about whether they could join the team.

In theory, the game would provide a kitchen sink of options where players could stumble onto what they wanted, and relive their high school life by interacting with whatever of these they wished.

But around the time Microsoft purchased Lionhead in April 2006, Lionhead pulled the plug on Dimitri. Five years had passed, and, although the Eden Falls reboot was still in early stages and sources say its development was more focused, the team wasn't able to keep the project going.

Much of the Dimitri team moved on to a game called Survivors — a post-apocalyptic third-person shooter based on a family trying to survive and make its way across the U.S. And while the name "Eden Falls" lived on briefly as a codename for Survivors, soon Survivors also was canceled.

Dimitri, as a product, team and idea, was dead. Mostly.

Gary Carr jumped on board from the start as creative director, trying to build out the concept. "It was purely about taking Peter's idea of a single being who's a sponge, and evolving a single human," says Carr.

The player would serve as Milo's imaginary friend — a Big Brother/Sister of sorts, helping to raise him, teach him games and build his confidence. It was about parenting, in some respects, as much as it was about friendship.

As Carr and others chipped away at the concept, a small team built a prototype where the player could wash dishes, flip through a journal, help Milo care for a vegetable patch and teach him to walk on his hands — balancing with an analog stick in the pre-Kinect days.

Lionhead also hired people from outside the game industry to work on a story that would involve player choices, bringing in film director John Dower and theatre/film/TV/radio writer Lin Coghlan to construct a narrative that would make the project feel like a film, despite its nontraditional interface.

It started going well enough that in press interviews at the time, Molyneux began talking the project up. "This discovery has lead to us starting a game, and this game will be on the front cover of nature magazines and scientific magazines," he told website Gamers Global in early 2008. "It's that significant. I think it's such an incredible thing that we're doing, I think it is ... important."

Because Milo & Kate allowed players to befriend a young boy, some on the development team started to worry about negative publicity from things falling into the wrong hands — especially after Lionhead announced the project and message boards lit up. To many, Milo seemed ripe for player abuse — with the player controlling his imaginary friend and being asked to talk to Milo and hold up drawings for him to see.

"Obviously, that was a never-ending thing — how to keep it out of perversion," says Palmer.

In places, the developers could use tricks to avoid issues — making players hold their own drawings up to Kinect's camera for Milo to look at, instead of him drawing what they told him to. But at times, well intentioned moments became potential issues, such as a scene where players would help Milo get dressed.

"People were very, very nervous about that," says a team member. "A lot of people on the team were saying, 'Well, when the tabloid newspapers get ahold of this ...'"

Part of the trouble was internal confusion about Milo & Kate's target audience. Some in the office felt it should be aimed at families and adults, while others viewed it as something for children. One staffer recalls hearing Molyneux describe it for families and adults midway through development, and feeling like up to that point he assumed it was for kids, or at best families.

It would be impossible for the team to control what players did to try to trick Milo into something inappropriate, given the interface and the potential for edited videos, though team members say it helped that Milo's story was mostly linear so he could ignore things he didn't understand.

In one example, Milo would explore the forest behind his family's house and climb along a tree trunk, then wait for the player while the player would balance as they walked across. Then Milo would move on, ducking under a tree — which the player then had to do as well. The sequence would ramp up into something highly choreographed, team members say, with the forest getting darker and the music becoming unnerving and Milo telling the player a scary story along the way.

The biggest issue for the team was scenes like this cost a lot of money. Most games rely on repeating the same actions over and over, but each of Milo's story moments had to be developed by hand.

As a solution, Lionhead took inspiration from the Dreamcast virtual pet game Seaman, where players only had a few minutes each day to interact with the main character and were motivated to check back each day to feed him and keep him alive. In Milo, story scenes would play out for 15-20 minutes a day, while minigames and exploration padded out the experience. "We had a fixed narrative path for Milo, so [we] obviously couldn't have Milo dying on us," says a team member. "But we were keen to have the story unfold in small bite-size chunks over a number of days."

Sources say the software struggled in the areas outside these guided scenes — such as Milo understanding what players said and the precision of Kinect controls for minigames. One staffer calls out skimming stones as particularly fun, since it relied on one simple movements, but says it wasn't very precise and a player could wave their hand and get as good a score as someone trying. Another says that sometimes Milo trying to act smart would backfire and result in confusion:

"Milo would give the player a riddle: 'What cheese is made backwards?' and the player would say, 'Feta?' and Milo would say, 'No, it's not cheddar,' and we would all laugh and look longingly out of the window at the soft warm tarmac 20 stories below."

Everyone asked for this story agrees that Lionhead developed Milo & Kate with an end goal in mind, that the project made it approximately 60 percent through development, that approximately 80 team members worked on it at its peak and that it could have been finished with an extra six months of production, though it would have felt rough if that happened.

The public shorthand for that, however, became the question of whether Milo & Kate was officially a game or a tech demo. A question of messaging on the surface, which pointed at the bigger debate of whether Microsoft and Lionhead planned to sell it.

This all started at E3 2009, when Molyneux told media that yes, it was "for sure" a game.

"This is a game," he told website Edge. "It's a game that's going to be made. My ambition is to complete it when [Kinect] ships, a complete game with a story and a score and gameplay mechanics. It's not just a tech demo."

But as time went on, Microsoft executives contradicted those statements.

Most prominently, on June 28, 2010, Xbox Director of Product Management Aaron Greenberg told Australian TV show Good Game, "[Milo is] a tech demo and technology that continues to exist, but right now it's not a game that we're planning to bring to market."

The next day, Greenberg amended his comment in a statement on Twitter: "Project Milo absolutely continues in development at Lionhead Studios; it is just not a product we plan to bring to market this holiday."

The day after that, Molyneux told website GamesIndustry.biz, "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. ... This is a full product that we're working on. It's not going to be released this year for sure; it's not part of the launch line-up."

And two weeks after that, Molyneux appeared on stage with the project at nonprofit conference TED, marking Milo's second public appearance — this time shown live. It featured the stone skimming minigame and more on-screen icons than the previous demonstration, closer resembling a traditional game interface, and proving it could work live.

Then in August, Molyneux backtracked and told USA Today's Game Hunters website, "I don't think of it as a released product at the moment. I still think this is a very, very big tech demo. I don't think of it as something that would be a boxed product on the shelf."

One team member says Molyneux wanted to make it into a game but ultimately that wasn't his decision. Others give mixed messages on whether they considered it a game.

"I can't say that it was 100 percent a game," says Senior Concept Artist Emrah Elmasli. "People thinking that it was a game was mainly the biggest misconception [people had about Milo & Kate] in my opinion."

"I think it's fascinating that some people say, 'It wasn't a game; it was just a demo.' But it really was a game," says another team member.

"I don't think we knew, to be honest," says Carr, noting that a full production game for the team would usually have more than 100 people on board. "I think we were playing with something, and we built quite a lot of it, and you could sit down for a couple hours and enjoy noodling around his house, and going fishing, and skimming stones, and doing all sorts of cool games. But I don't think we ever really sat down and said, 'This is going to be a product.'"

One source refers to this as Carr "toeing the company line," while another views it as a simple difference of opinion around the office.

"I'd describe Milo & Kate as a development experiment that somehow found itself in full production," says another team member. "In all honesty it really was trying to be something new and different, and there were certainly some cool and compelling aspects to it. However as a project it always lacked strong direction and clear vision ... it was basically confused, and never quite solidified into something everyone was comfortable with."

None of this is to say staff at Microsoft and Lionhead didn't look into their options.

Evidence that the companies were considering commercial possibilities comes from three different places — multiple sources confirm that early in development Lionhead and Microsoft held talks to include Milo & Kate as a pack-in with the Kinect hardware, that the companies discussed potentially breaking the project's post-release content into pieces and releasing it episodically and that Lionhead started work on a social game that would tie-in with the Xbox 360 project.

Designer Wayne Imlach contracted briefly with Lionhead in 2010 to work on the social title, a browser and phone "lite" game known as "Milo's Projects" and "Milo & Kate for Web" that he says never got past an early prototype. The design focused on a school project where Milo would collect plants and animals in his garden, then look after them, and Imlach says it was designed to be "a companion product to the console game, so the mechanics were less geared toward the aggressive monetization and compulsive social obligation you tended to find in Facebook games at the time."

In 2013, Lionhead isn't the same team that created Milo, either literally or figuratively. The studio saw layoffs following Milo's cancelation, and further layoffs following completion of Fable: The Journey.

In that same timeframe, various team members left Lionhead voluntarily, many to start independent studios. Molyneux departed in March 2012 to start developer 22cans, and took Dimitri Mavrikakis, Chief Technical Officer Tim Rance and Executive Art Director Paul McLaughlin with him. Others went on to found Wonderland Software, Another Place Productions and Kinesthetic Games. Still others left for Microsoft's technology team in Redmond, Wash. Some joined HTML5 game developer Turbulenz. Even after Carr's interview for this story, Lionhead Co-founder and Studio Head Mark Webley left, leaving Carr as one of the few longtime senior team members remaining at the company.

"I think it's turned over more than average purely because a lot of people at the same time maybe went through a period of, they'd done their term, right? And that's a natural process," says Carr. "They just needed to try something different. And I think it's a good thing to do that. I think companies have to regenerate — you need to get some fresh blood in, some new ideas. And I'm excited about the new guys we've got here at Lionhead."

The main difference between Lionhead then and Lionhead now, he says, is better communication. "I think we're much more inclusive on allowing other people to actually have their voice and propose things, or actually say, 'This is rubbish. Why are we doing this?' ... Because we're a younger company now — weirdly, 15 years old, we're a younger company — there's people with less experience. So I think they need each other and we need them."

Carr's long term goal for the company is simple: "Just keep us relevant. Make sure that we are seen beyond the Peter Molyneux era. Make the next 15 years more successful than the first 15 years. That's my goal. ... You know, Peter's still a big fan and a big friend, and he'll still come in nearly every day. ... That's what we want him to do, because he formed this company, and to me — and I said this when he left — I'll still think of it as his company. But we can still change the way it moves forward, and breathe some new life into it."

Recent job postings suggest that Lionhead may currently be developing a multiplayer online role-playing game for Microsoft's next Xbox, which would tie in with Microsoft Europe's recently announced desire to move away from packaged products and towards "connected entertainment services."

While Carr can't speak to that project, he says that Lionhead has a history of revisiting discarded ideas, so while Milo may be gone, that doesn't mean the team won't attempt something similar down the road.

"Nothing ever goes away," he says. "Whenever you're in the creative business, these things somehow come back in some form. It might not be a boy. It might be something else. But these kind of things tend to come back.

"We've always evolved things. I mean, another game we did called Magic Carpet — we originally designed that as a screensaver. ... It eventually became a game. It's just the kind of things [Molyneux's] companies have always done. So it didn't feel strange to us [that Milo didn't turn into a game]. It may not have been good business sense in the short term, but generally in the long term [these ideas] pay off."

Carr makes it clear that at the moment, no one at Lionhead is tinkering on Milo in a corner somewhere — "I can say that for certain," he says — but he leaves the door open for the future. And despite Milo's public struggles, Carr says he's still in favor of running experiments that might not turn into sellable products.

"You know, what's wrong with a few of those? I mean, it makes the world an interesting place," he says. "Yeah, I think we will. I think if we don't do that — if there's not a place for that — then Lionhead isn't relevant. I think Lionhead is a company that should do those things, should have some occasional tremendous failures, but out of that kind of attitude may come new genres."