LMNO: The Canceled Steven Spielberg RPG

Movie director Steven Spielberg has had a long connection to gaming. Not only the he a gamer himself, the movie icon has long helped create game franchises and even founded Dream Works Interactive, which would go on to later become DICE Los Angeles. So it may not shock some that the famed creator had a few ideas for games that never came to fruition. One of those games was a mysterious narrative focused RPG that only two teasers was every released.

LMNO.

LMNO was the working title for a 2008 game Steven Spielberg was partnered to create with Electronic Arts. The game itself being developed by Arkane Studios (the developers of Dishonored and Prey (2017)), the game was going to be a mix of a captivating narrative and unique for its time gameplay. The project was heavily followed by certain segments of the gaming world despite the fact that only a very short teasers and images were ever released.

LMNO was going to be a first-person adventure parkour game where players would travel and interact with a mysterious and alien character, named Eve. With role-play mechanics mixed in, it promised to be a story filled with emotion and deep character relationships.

After 3 years of development and a slow drip of information about its status, LMNO was eventually announced as canceled in 2010 (with some reports claiming that it was canceled without ceremony a year before).

So why was it canceled?

Conflicting accounts of why the game died have been circling for years. While some blame the commercial failure of another Spielberg – EA collaboration project, Boom Blox, the most well-believed report is that internal politics of EA caused the game’s cancellation. EA created its own internal rivals to LMNO and no definitive work had reportedly begun on the game.

LMNO is one of those projects that was so hidden and mysterious that it is a shame that it wasn’t made cause now we will never know just what amazing story we missed out on.

But who knows, it might still come around. Weirder things have happened.

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