The director’s much-hyped LMNO video game was reportedly in development for years.
He rescued Amity from Jaws, reminded us of Oskar Schindler’s heroic list, and, of course, saved Private Ryan. But even a filmmaker as messianic as Steven Spielberg couldn’t do the same for his latest video game project.
After years of work on the top-secret “Project LMNO,” publisher EA has officially announced that the title has been canceled.
“While EA maintains its relationship with Steven Spielberg, we ceased development of LMNO,” a company rep told game blog Joystiq.
The news came to light during a podcast with industry vet Jake Kazdal, who revealed that he worked on the doomed project for over two years.
“I don’t want to get the EA police on me. I can’t say too much. It was very ambitious,” he said on the podcast. “I don’t know exactly what was the thing that made it fall apart.”
“There was some rival game stuff that may or may not have come out of EA that was basically the same thing minus some of the stuff we were doing,” he continued. “There was just a lot of politics.”
The death of LMNO — a very ‘Spielberg’ action-adventure featuring a secret agent and a female alien — is one of the few blemishes on Spielberg’s otherwise solid game career. He’s credited as being the creator of the company’s Medal of Honor shooter series, which debuted on the Playstation back in 1999 (a reboot of the franchise set in modern-day Afghanistan releases this week, though he’s not involved.) He’s also the designer of the critically-acclaimed Boom Blox titles for the Wii.
Boom Blox and LMNO were the first two titles revealed as part of a three-game Spielberg / EA development partnership back in 2005. There’s been no word on the state of the third and final game.
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