Electronic Arts has officially announced that their long-stalled Steven Spielberg collaboration, code-named Project LMNO, has been cancelled.
Responding to a request for comment from Joystiq, EA confirmed that development on the project has ceased, clarifying that "EA maintains its relationship with Steven Spielberg."
The announcement comes after an appearance on the latest 8-4 Play podcast by former EA developer Jake Kazdal, who said he worked on the project for two-and-a-half years before its cancellation.
"I don't know exactly what was the thing that made it fall apart," Kazdal said on the podcast. "I'm sure anybody you ask is gonna tell you something a little bit different, but it didn't end up ever taking off."
"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. There was just a lot of politics."
Following on the critical success and commercial failure of EA and Spielberg's first collaboration, 2008's Boom Blox, Project LMNO was reportedly centered around bringing "Spielbergness" to believable AI characters.
Many in the industry considered the project dead in the water after the closure of EA internal developer Blueprint Studio in late 2008, but Electronic Arts had insisted the game was still under development numerous times in the past two years.
I suspect this project was dead the minute Neil Young left EA to form ngmoco. Young was the liaison between Spielberg and EA, and he knows how to get things cranked out.
Commercial failure? Well, the first one sold over half a million units. It may not have been a million seller, but it ensured a second game in the series.
His relationship is actually rooted in old DreamWorks Interactive days, before it was sold off to EA, becoming EA LA. Man, golden times. We felt like kids, running around putting on a play in your uncles barn...green light system was more simple then. Impress Steven. Some really cool work was done back then, many of the old DreamWorks crew became the first leg of EA LA, and Speilberg naturally had ties there moving forward. Do you know that the idea of a German kicking back a grenade that you tossed near him (Medal of Honor PS1) was an idea Steven had emailed to the dev team? He gets and loves games. That's late 90's compared to current film makers now climbing all over the game industry.
http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20080506/Steven_Spielberg_AND_Louis_Castle _270x390.jp
g for an example.
But, of course, the project lead on LMNO was Doug Church, who was more than able to keep up intellectually.