Project Milo: The Biggest Lie Microsoft Ever Told

hello I'm Bill Gates chairman of Microsoft in this video you're going to see the future all right it's 2009. pigs are flying everything has this aesthetic and Microsoft has just announced a groundbreaking new piece of tech at E3 utilizing the latest advancements in motion capture project natal as it was initially named was a new device for the Xbox that aimed to win audiences over with pure wow factor the main goal of natal was to bring families into the gaming equation by taking controllers out of it and this resulted in an intuitive get up and play experience that made it easy for any demographic to play and enjoy for 2009 it was pretty damn impressive and in the eyes of many consumers it made Sony and Nintendo's motion Tech look kind of obsolete but that night at E3 Microsoft would manage to continue the hype train you see after the unveiling of project natal another speaker would take the stage to present a tech demo for Microsoft's new hardware you know I I want to just say one thing to you and that's the word interactive that's Peter Mullen no game designer for the Fable series and former creative director at Microsoft and what he's about to share with this audience at E3 will Echo an eternity as one of the most intentionally deceitful unveilings in Microsoft's history in his presentation Peter claims to have developed an experience with natal that he thinks will fulfill every Gamer's lifelong dream to build an innocent yet intimate relationship with a 10 year old boy oh wait what oh you guys just wanted Fable 3 oh in the demo Peter introduces us to project Milo a game about a boy that can supposedly see you hear you and actually get to know you through the screen hiya Milo how you doing hi Claire you okay by making use of the natal Hardware Peter demonstrates how players can seemingly interact with Milo through free-flowing conversations giving the impression that the character on screen is somehow capable of independent thought here we're saying Claire being recognized and the emotion in Claire's voice being recognized and that emotion reflecting in Milo's face those are all being seen for the first time at first glance it looks quite impressive yet the way Peter describes it you'd think his team had just stumbled on the means to creating sentient Ai and something tells me that's kind of what he wanted us to think what's worse is that one look back at the comment section for this presentation proves that we've bought right in of course there were Skeptics but for the majority people really thought Milo was a game changer literally I mean audiences were more excited for this game than the actual Hardware it was demoed for not to mention the potential this kind of AI had for countless genres in the industry the problem it was all complete the demo was fake the actor was acting and Peter was essentially lying through his teeth or was he no I'm just kidding he was he totally was and this was most certainly not the first time either you see Peter was Notorious throughout the industry for over-promising exaggerating and flat out lying about upcoming games I mean you could probably score the rest of this video with the Flight of the Bumblebee and it would match the tone for the level of chaos this man has caused but Milo Milo was his magnum opus a lie so deceitful that it crossed the point of outrage to just actually being kind of impressive by utilizing his arsenal of clever word choice alongside demo footage that mainly consisted of smoke and mirrors Peter managed to convince an entire generation of Gamers that he had developed a technology 50 years ahead of its time what would ensue was a roller coaster ride of PR Shenanigans miscommunication backpedaling and deception that would ultimately amount to nothing but to understand how this happened in the first place we need to take a look back at the man himself Peter oh Peter after founding bullfrog Productions in 1987 Peter Molino would leap headfirst into game design with a focus on population Sims you know the ones those top-down games with disembodied hands that control everything in the game World these Concepts were fascinating to Peter and ultimately became the stage that allowed his knack for ideation to really shine what if you were the owner of a theme park the keeper of a dungeon or the deity in charge of an entire Island Peter's games put the player in complete control which ultimately helped redefine the scope for what games could actually be about and usually with outstanding results throughout his time at bullfrog Peter would make Leaps and Bounds within the simulation space known well for his early adoption of artificial intelligence and his invention of the god game genre this would eventually lead their longtime publisher Electronic Arts to acquire the company in 1995. unfortunately EA's acquisition changed the way bullfrog developed games and Peter who was unsatisfied With The Changes left the studio in 97 to pursue a new Venture this would ultimately lead Molino to found lionhead Studios with a handful of other ex-bull Froggers from there Peter would spend a sizable chunk of money from the bullfrog deal investing over 6 million dollars into lionhead's first game after three years of development Black and White released in March of 2001 and was met with widespread critical Acclaim the game was praised heavily for its accomplishments in artificial intelligence even appearing in the 2003 Guinness World Records for having the most intelligent being in a game these accomplishments were what ultimately solidified Peter's belief in AI inspiring him and his team to pursue further research on the topic so that same year Peter would officially launch a research project the goal of their efforts was to develop a game that was smarter than anything ever seen on the market a game that years from now would eventually become Milo but until then Peter would code name his Venture project Dimitri you see Peter loved code names and had a quirk of introducing and changing these names every time he spoke to journalists throughout his career there was Project Dimitri project ego Project X Project Milo I mean for a guy that couldn't keep his mouth shut in front of journalists he sure did love secrets and this problem had certainly become evident throughout his career up until this point Peter had already begun developing a reputation for himself as somewhat of an over promiser notorious for making outlandish claims about features that would be included in upcoming games Peter would later confess to even making up new features on the spot just to keep journalists interested and that problem would only grow worse when his company released Fable in 2004. to build excitement for the game Peter would make all sorts of false promises for fable which ultimately ended up hurting the game's reception among fans to give you a better idea of what I mean here's just a few one Peter said that Fable would be a completely open world with zero invisible boundaries two Peter said you could have children who take over as the playable character if you die in the game three Peter said you could plant a tree and watch it grow to fruition in real time and so on of course none of these promises actually made it into the game and probably caused most of his development team to slam their heads through drywall the worst part was that Fable was a good game that just happened to fall flat because of heightened expectations some may write this Behavior off as a passionate game designer getting overly excited about his game but no matter how you twist it Peter's big mouth was just plain unprofessional and it was starting to affect his reputation after Microsoft acquired lionhead in 2005 the suits would attempt to remedy this issue by keeping a PR team around Peter at all times this was done to ensure he didn't get himself into any more trouble yeah these these I'm not allowed to talk about were the pr gods that are standing at the back shooting daggers with their eyes obviously I can't answer questions like that because that me I made but I would get killed for if I announced it by now you're prob you're probably wondering well how does Milo fit into all this and you'd be right to ask that well sometime in 2007 after many years of experimenting Peter had finally found some direction for project Dimitri for roughly six years lionhead's Research into AI game systems had never actually resulted in a full game sure many of their advancements made it into other games as features but nothing quite managed to harness all of their efforts into one single title and now with pressure from Microsoft to actually return results Peter needed to finally turn his passion project into profit so in 2007 Peter pitched a brand new idea to his associate Gary Carr who was then an executive producer at Microsoft this new idea would build upon everything the team had worked on with project Dimitri but under a completely new name you see by 2007 codenamed Dimitri was kind of a bad word around lionhead and had become somewhat synonymous with failure so in order to improve morale regarding the project Peter would codename their new Venture Milo named after the game's protagonist development for project Milo officially began in 2007 as a sort of simulation centered around the life of one individual this of course took Peter's usual formula of population-based Sims and flipped it on its head instead of a simulation involving multiple people project Milo would be about just one a boy and your actions in the game would determine who Milo grew up to be it was basically a glorified parenting Sim except instead of taking the role of an actual parent you were more of a friend or Mentor or slave I mean the first prototype literally just had you doing Milo's chores and from what I've learned it didn't sound incredibly impressive but according to Peter project Milo was utilizing an impressive display of AI technology combining advancements made with project Dimitri alongside Microsoft's own research it was something Peter felt incredibly proud of leading him to suggest in an interview that their achievements could eventually find them on the front page of Science magazine an important thing to note though was that until this point project Milo was strictly being developed for use with a controller and there was absolutely no knowledge of project natal up to this point that was until 2008 when one of Peter's Associates at Microsoft spilled the beans turns out a group of Microsoft Engineers had been working closely with an Israeli tech company to bring motion sensing Hardware to the Xbox 360. this technology was first introduced to the world at the 2006 game developers conference by a company called Prime sense at the convention primesense revealed a revolutionary new device capable of sensing and mapping human bodies in real time at this point the tech was still in its early stages but it showed promise which was Illustrated through Prime sense's earliest concept videos and while many of these demonstrations looked impressive the production quality was a bit more akin to a Tim and Eric sketch so what was the name of that movie you told me you wanted to see the other day how about that one I have to order pizza oh Hi how are you uh hey Greg how you doing I'm gonna have to call you back tomorrow night okay bye bye as cheesy as these demos were the concept most certainly caught the attention of Microsoft and especially Peter Molino this would lead Peter to completely rework project Milo to incorporate this new hardware which Microsoft had codenamed project natal Peter now envisioned a game where players could actually speak to Milo through natal and Milo would ideally respond back Microsoft ran with it and for roughly the next year and a half lionhead would double the size of their team to help steer project Milo in this new Direction this would set off the chain of events that would eventually lead to Peter's Infamous demo at e309 contrary to popular belief project Milo was not entirely a hoax as misleading as it was the video Peter showed at E3 was technically not a complete fabrication because lionhead was really working on a real game and after the incorporation of project natal Milo was actually capable of a handful of impressive feats he could understand over 500 unique words recognize the color of your clothing and even interpret the tone of your voice this was all real technology that the lionhead team was working on and it was all really being done with project natal the problem it was still pretty janky developers who worked on the project admitted that it was a challenge to demonstrate the game live and players could very easily break the illusion of Milo's sentience if they wish to do so what made this situation more dire was the fact that later that year project Milo was set to be unveiled at E3 alongside natal so how would they do it well they'd stage it of course I mean was it really that big of a lie as long as the game was actually being developed well yes especially when you consider the way the demo was fabricated just a few weeks before E3 lionhead would hire an actress to help stage their presentation and worked with a film crew to produce it and look staging certain aspects of a technology for the purposes of ensuring a smooth presentation is maybe arguably one thing but the creative Liberties that were taken with Milo's demo made implications that grossly exaggerated the capabilities of the actual product and this was the factor that ultimately landed Peter in such hot water now let's jump back to E3 2009 where Microsoft has just finished unveiling project natal for the first time the tech is impressive and kind of steals the show from Sony who unveiled a wand-based version of their own motion Tech the same night that racket is actually in the virtual world it's in Anton's hand next to take the stage is Peter who I can only assume is engaged in some sort of weird pre-show ritual behind the curtains very ala Joker I mean you got to be a little crazy to pull a stunt like this in front of the entire gaming industry so Peter makes his presentation and introduces Milo to the world I am Milo how you doing hi Claire you okay actually I'm a bit nervous you nervous I don't believe it on First Watch the video actually looks pretty convincing but as we come to find Peter is using a mix of both deceptive gameplay footage and clever language to mislead the viewer the interactions presented in the video make the implication that players can have complex free-flowing conversations with Milo and can come to form deep personal relationships with him listen I was thinking today you should let me beat you at football again that is if you finished your homework you have finished your school project what happened there is that Claire knew Milo so well she knew when he was worried about something of course as you can probably tell this entire interaction is scripted there's even moments in the video where Milo appears to remember seemingly impressive details about the actress's personal life science fiction is not even written about your mom's birthday did you catch that apparently Milo just on a whim remembered Claire's mom's birthday which once again tries to reinforce the idea that the two actually have a relationship later on in the video Milo leads Claire to a pond where natal's capabilities for motion capture are shown off a little bit yet for some reason even a basic Mini-Game like this was faked upon closer inspection you'll realize that Claire's movements are not entirely in sync with her reflection for one reason or another this entirely pre-rendered scene has the actress superimposed into the reflection of the water forcing Claire to memorize her original movements and attempt to perform them in sync with the footage on screen this obviously leads to errors and quickly becomes exhibit a for many Skeptics trying to debunk the video later on but what proves to be one of the most glaring oversights of the whole video is actually a matter of perspective let me explain when you're viewing any sort of portrait from your Viewpoint the subject of your gaze appears to follow you wherever you move around the room it's why paintings like the Mona Lisa seem to always be watching you even if you change where you're standing so why isn't Milo doing that yes he's looking at Claire but we're not looking from Claire's perspective this is of course once again because the entire video was fabricated when the lionhead team was putting together this demo they found that Milo's natural line of vision would be directed towards the camera ultimately ruining the immersion they wanted to create between Milo and Claire so they faked it and in a blatant rejection for the laws of perspective the team re-rigged Milo to look slightly to the side to look at Claire as you can probably tell so far practically none of the aspects of the video were actually real shocker I know and even if certain footage represented aspects of the game that did work it was far easier to just fake the whole thing for example towards the end of the presentation Claire would draw a picture of a fish and hold it up to the camera Milo would then supposedly pull the image into the game world and look at it himself and funnily enough this Tech actually did work in a live demo setting turns out Milo had an incredible knack for recognizing drawings through the natal camera and even learned to identify specific objects through machine learning it was actually one of the things Milo was best at and there was even talk of improving the text so that Milo could learn to identify new drawings as you showed them to him of course the reins were pulled back on this to avoid making Milo an expert on identifying crudely drawn penises but the take home here is that it did actually work so in summary what Peter essentially showed the audience that night was a demo of a game that did technically exist but the format in which they chose to present that game took way more creative Liberties than it ever should have and what did that result in possibly the most misled outpouring of enthusiasm a game has ever seen apart from a few other titles people were losing their minds about this game I mean if Milo was really as true to life as Peter had claimed then this would have massive implications not only for gaming itself but technology as a whole if only it were true later that night after the E3 press conference a select group of journalists were picked to actually meet Milo and demo the project for themselves and this is where things started to take a bit of a turn while the demo was impressive many play testers would quickly come to see through the smoke and mirror tricks used to give Milo the illusion of sentience for example Milo could understand words but only certain ones and those words had to be given within the correct context to be understood in the first place if you asked Milo something yourself and he didn't understand his code would prompt him to either politely nod or shake his head which made many attempts at communication just kind of fall flat if you tried to tell him a joke sometimes Milo could read the tone of your voice and interpret it as such omitting a laugh of course Milo didn't actually get the joke and wouldn't comment on it in any way but it was part of the illusion the game tried to convey most journalists remarked on how if you played Milo by the rules you could actually have half decent conversations with him but any and I mean any attempt to go off script would immediately poke holes in the illusion but the journalists Impressions didn't really do much to quell the excitement for the game just like any hype train once it gets going it's kind of hard to stop so E3 2009 ends and Microsoft is swarmed with enthusiastic journalists chomping at the bit for details about Milo and project natal and the excitement is palpable so tell me more about your role with project natal so I'm essentially the technical director for the technologies that you saw so from our perspective the inspiration really was could we actually incorporate the human into the gameplay so that we could create a system whereby of course Peter does a few interviews as well and you can rest assured his PR team is standing just outside the frame what is the objective well I could you know what I would love to tell you that I could completely tell you I could go through the story there's you know an amazing story but I have given myself I will not talk about things unless I can show them but it is definitely a game [Music] when asked if players can expect a release date for project Milo Peter ensures that development is in full swing and while a release date cannot be given the game is most certainly expected to be brought to Market yet strangely enough that would be the last time we'd hear of Milo for a very long time the following year E3 2010 would come and go without so much as a word from Milo and fans definitely had some questions but this time they got different answers he's uh you know the Milo project was something that lionhead studios in their Labs had developed and obviously that's a tech demo and technology that continues to to exist but right now it's uh it's not a game that we're planning to bring to Market that we executive for Microsoft who made that statement sometime in 2010. shortly after that Peter would go on record to quite condescendingly denounce Aaron's statements it was a weird era in the game's development where depending on who you asked at Microsoft your answer on Project Milo was completely different behind the scenes Peter was in a sort of power struggle with the higher ups at Microsoft after roughly three years in development project Milo now called Milo and Kate was failing to meet the expectations Microsoft had in place for the title and it definitely didn't help that Peter had wildly raised those expectations back in 2009 worse still Microsoft had significantly pulled back on Project natal's Hardware capabilities attempting to cut costs by downgrading the device's processor which subsequently narrowed the scope for project Milo fast forward to mid-2010 and fans are wondering when and if they'll ever get an update on Milo's development and finally after over a year of anticipation Peter would eventually break his silence on the project this update would come in the form of a TED Talk which was already a really really bad side if Microsoft actually had realistic plans to release Milo they would have announced it at E3 2010 earlier that year but clearly the game's release had reached a level of uncertainty that could no longer justify a feature at the event so instead Peter opts to quietly demo the game at Ted Global in what could be seen as one of the most egregious attempts at backpedaling I have ever seen I mean what Peter demonstrates to the crowd at Ted Global is almost a completely different game from what he showed fans the year before and the way he introduces it just makes it all the worse so a year ago I showed this off at a computer show called E3 really Peter a computer show this comment was either a sign that Peter was getting old or rather a feeble attempt to avoid mentioning the word video game to what I can only assume is a slightly older audience this was a piece of technology it was someone called Claire interacting with this boy and there was a huge row online about hey this can't be real and so I waited till now to have an actual demo of the real Attack wow Peter the brain Molino has done it again who knew this was his plan the whole time no way this was some sort of half-baked attempt to backtrack on false promises made for a game that was built on misleading footage and blatant lies it was just a primer to get us excited for the actual game okay but really though have you ever witnessed a more blatant admission of guilt I mean he literally he comes out and says this is the actual demo of the real Tech at this point he's not even trying to hide that the game was a lie and then he has the audacity to try and put a bow on the whole thing by pinpointing his team's One Soul goal just to get to this one simple idea create a real living being in a computer oh yeah Peter that one simple idea you mean the idea that modern technology hasn't even come close to cracking the idea that could one day lead to technological singularity subsequently blurring the definition of what it actually means to be human and you found that on the Xbox 360. listen I've really tried to cut Peter some slack in this video but the way he talks about creating Milo like he's some sort of 21st century Geppetto is just really really annoying yet he still tries to redeem himself with what appears to be some new found attempt at transparency now I'll be honest with you and say that most of it is just a trick [Music] wow there's a reason I'm spending so much time on this intro I mean with every sentence Peter just finds a way to dig himself into a deeper hole and it just keeps getting funnier so why don't we go over and have a look at the demo now this is Dimitri wait this is Dimitri like the project Dimitri turns out this part isn't alive apparently the original project was named after his godson the whole time who actually worked at lionhead on the Fable games who knew now comes the actual demo the honest demo and there's one key difference right off the bat it appears as though this time we have a real person playing the game live finally the curtains have been drawn back and we can see some real gameplay for the first time let's check it out so he's discovering the garden you're helping him discover the garden by just pointing out these snails so the demo finally begins and what we appear to get is some sort of on-rails snail spotting simulator it's a bizarre way to start especially considering the Bold claims Peter made about Milo in the intro as the camera rolls along Milo finds another snail on the ground at which point Milo encounters his first test of morality turns out Milo has a thirst for blood and sadism and toys with the idea of squishing the snail underneath his shoe at this point Dimitri is prompted to use voice commands to either encourage Milo's behavior or stop him do you want Milo to squash it squash it no that's the right thing to do no there's the right thing to do well that was unexpected but what doesn't come as a surprise is how the voice recognition system has changed you'll notice that in this new demo there are explicit prompts for when you can actually speak to Milo of course this wildly contradicts Peter's first demo of the game in which it's heavily implied that speech is free-flowing and spontaneous at this point the presentation continues for another six or seven minutes where Peter demos a handful of other incredibly boring minigames but what makes it funny is how these demonstrations are always accompanied by long-winded boasts of how the game is so much more sophisticated than it actually looks his face by the way is fully AI driven we have complete control over his blush responses the diameter of his nostrils his mind is based in the cloud if you're leaning forward he would slightly change the neuro-linguistic nature of his face you're actually sculpting a human being here we've got a database of Words which we recognize we pick those words out we also we offers a reference that with his tone uh the tonation database in all honesty I would imagine the audience was bored to death by this presentation after three years in development the game just looks so incredibly underwhelming and one can come to understand why Microsoft felt the same way this is also made evident by The presentation's View count which is dwarfed in comparison to the millions of views garnered by the first demo so it may come as no surprise to learn that shortly after this presentation was made Microsoft would permanently shut down development for Milo and Kate this was of course due to a multitude of different factors and can't be simply attributed to one reason speculation points toward the fact that Milo was being developed during a time when the connect was still trying to understand its target audience as the project evolved Microsoft would opt to Target demographics engaged in party settings which kind of put Milo's mellow single-player gameplay into an awkward category it's also fair to speculate that Microsoft closed development due to false expectations surrounding the game which were set So High by Peter's outlandish claims whatever the reasons the news came as a devastating blow to the lionhead team who were all incredibly excited about what they had built up to that point regardless of Peter's lies project Milo really utilized state-of-the-art technology that resulted in many impressive features there was formidable voice image and even emotional recognition that genuinely would have held weight as impressive features for its time so it came as even more of a disappointment when the team was forced to recycle all of their progress into a watered-down spin-off for the Fable series The Way Microsoft saw it they weren't going to let three years of technological development fall through the cracks without making a little cash so much of lionhead's research ended up being reworked into a new connect game set in the Fable Universe suddenly Milo's emotional recognition was being repurposed so players could develop bonds with in-game horses and Milo's hand tracking became the foundation for casting spells it definitely wasn't the kind of closure the lionhead team wanted for Milo but at least it was actually released unfortunately fable the Journey was received poorly for the connect with its main failing Point boiling down to you guessed it false expectations initially Peter Molino swore up and down that the game would not be an on-rails experience but upon release fans would come to find that exploration within the game was entirely linear and players were certainly not happy after Fable's failure on connect in 2012 Peter would leave lionhead permanently to pursue yet another independent venture due to reasons most likely pertaining to Milo's cancellation Peter felt as though Microsoft's hold on lionhead was becoming too much of a creative barrier and was disheartened with the company's decision to can the project Peter would then go on to found his third new company in the gaming industry 22 cans unsurprisingly though Peter's new Venture would fall prey to much of the same behavior that he was known for previously with a sequence of scandals and false promises that would continue as a result of his presence in the media it seems like no matter what team he was a part of Peter was always finding ways of getting himself into trouble as for Milo well it's been almost 10 years since anyone has spoken about him many ex-lion head members went on to call the project Philip or a tech demo that accidentally wound up in production and some at Microsoft deny was ever a game in the first place in 2012 Peter was asked about his thoughts on Microsoft's decision to cancel Milo and in a Brazen attempt to deflect all blame claimed that he felt the industry just wasn't ready for it somehow Peter had convinced himself that project Milo was just too ahead of its time to be brought to Market and I guess if you consider all the lies he made about the game then yeah he was right at the end of the day it's kind of a shame if Peter had just focused more on what was possible with Milo instead of what could be possible we might have actually seen the game released and who knows it might have been half decent but the truth was Milo's technical capabilities just weren't Advanced enough to meet the expectations put in place for the project and the idea is that actually made Milo exciting just weren't ready to be made a reality but now with breakthroughs in artificial intelligence occurring every other day we may not have to wait too long before we see another company take a crack at the idea let's just hope that unlike Peter they've got the proof to back it up thanks for watching and it's it's it's surprisingly current in today's world if we look at politicians and and kings and queens and leaders they always promise US stuff and they never deliver on that stuff so I think that's an interesting part

Channel: slow start

Views: 759,300

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Id: VUL8UDVVJSA

Length: 35min 54sec (2154 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Mikeltee]

The creepiest boy that never existed

[u/Willywonkahc]

50 years ahead of its time? Sheeeeet, it sure feels like its just around the corner now :P