TITLE
The Story Behind LMNO
AUTHOR
Matt Leone
PUBLICATION
1UP
YEAR
2010
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
At the 2004 Game Developers Conference, Electronic Arts’ Neil Young (pictured, below) predicted that within five years, a video game would make players cry.“I think we’ll crack that problem in the next five years and it’ll be a watershed event for our business,” he said in a quote archived by website Idle Thumbs.
Puns aside, at the time, officially, he was speaking in general terms rather than about any specific game. But in 2005, when EA announced a deal with Steven Spielberg, Young found his poster child: a relationship-focused action title codenamed “LMNO.” The idea was ballsy and complicated — a mix of first-person parkour movement with adventure/RPG objectives and escape-focused gameplay, all based around the player’s relationship with an alien-looking character named Eve.
“If you think about the question that EA was originally founded on,” said Young in a 2005 interview with GameSpot, “which is, ‘Can a computer game [sic] make you cry? Can it move you like a great piece of art, a great film?’ We want to be able to, together with [Spielberg], start delivering some experiences that begin to get you there.”
Then three weeks ago — after years of saying very little about the game publicly — EA issued a statement confirming it “has ceased development” on the project. The news spread quickly, and by the time that game of telephone ended, stories across the Internet featured the headline “EA Cancels LMNO.”
What those stories left out was that the game was actually cancelled a year earlier — and arguably twice, depending on how you define the word.
For the past few months, we’ve been looking into the story behind the game — what the team was trying to create, what took so long, and why it died before making it to stores. And while many of the people involved declined to comment because of non-disclosure agreements with EA, thanks to a mix of those familiar with the project speaking anonymously, we’ve been able to put together a picture of one of the most ambitious games ever attempted.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Electronic Arts
Electronic Arts Los Angeles
GAMES MENTIONED
LMNO
Mirror’s Edge
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Louis Castle
Doug Church
Matt Sentell
Randy Smith
Steven Spielberg
Mike Verdu
Neil Young
TOPICS MENTIONED
Canceled Games