Milo And Kate Tech Influencing Kinectimals [UPDATE] News

The Vice-President of Microsoft Game Studios, Phil Spencer has revealed that Lionhead's Milo and Kate technology is influencing the upcoming pet sim Kinectimals, a launch game for Microsoft's Kinect peripheral this November.

"Milo and Kate, the technology is stuff that we're still incubating back in the studios," Spencer told OXM at E3. "I think Lionhead has always been a great place, and the nice thing about Peter [Molyneux] as Creative Director in Europe is you start to see some of those ideas around Milo also showing up in other places, so Kinectimals is actually done at Frontier."

This follows comments from Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg, who stated at E3 earlier this month that the Milo and Kate presentation at last year's E3 was nothing more than a tech demo and is "not a game that we're planning to bring to market".

Spencer, on the other hand, was a little more cryptic on the matter: "But Peter being so close has actually been able to take many of the learnings that Lionhead has done and help other teams, and when you see the interaction between the girl and the animal on stage you can see similarities to stuff we were working on with Milo, so we start with experiments and they may turn into games themselves. We may not have had anything to announce today with Milo but understand that those investments in creative research show up in many places."

It's beginning to look like a game of Milo and Kate's apparent scope isn't in the works at Lionhead after all, although the studio's Community Manager, Sam Van Tilburgh did Twitpic this 19 hours ago, so perhaps there's still hope. We'll send an e-mail off to Lionhead to see if we can get some clarity on the issue and will update this post if we get a response...

Update: Aaron Greenberg now appears to have made a U-turn on his initial comments by Tweeting, "Project Milo absolutely continues in development at Lionhead Studios. It is just not a product we plan to bring to market this holiday. The team at Lionhead has always been a center of innovation and will continue to deliver against that charter."

So, Milo and Kate lives after all?

Update 2: It lives!