Steven Spielberg's Epic Alien Game Was Canceled. Here's Why
In 2004, Neil Young, former Electronic Arts general manager, stated that EA would create a video game that would cause players to cry. These days, games such as The Last of Us 2 or Last Day of June are no stranger to pulling on somber heartstrings, but Young wanted to be one of the first to succeed.
In 2005, Young teamed up with Steven Spielberg to bring audiences a new game that would evoke emotion. The partnership was announced, and the game was in development up until 2010. Their aim was to produce an action game that was described to be "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 creature named Eve." The game could have been a landmark in gaming history. It would have changed the way that people approached video games.
The game, titled LMNO, would have been presented as a well-crafted piece of art, rather than a standard video game. At least, that was the intention of Young and Spielberg. Unfortunately, LMNO was met with some difficulties and was canceled.
LMNO was overly ambitious
The project just seemed to fall through. In 2008, EA decided that it would lay off most of the LMNO team. This changed the landscape of the game and the direction that it would follow. LMNO was to be reworked into a more traditional video game — something less ambitious. According to one former employee, "It was Uncharted set in a Spielberg universe." Needless to say, it sounds like LMNO would have been years ahead of its time.
There are conflicting statements regarding its fate floating around the web. There were rumors that the idea was basically scrapped in 2008, but the final verdict came in 2010: The project had officially been canceled. LMNO was too ambitious and expensive, and once the team was gutted, it was surely over. According to Jake Kazdal, former LMNO artist, "There was some rival game stuff that may or may not have come out of EA ... There was just a lot of politics." The rival game in question can only be assumed to be Mirror's Edge, which was released to the public in 2008 and also had that same action-adventure element with a side of parkour.