If Peter Molyneux didnt get into video games he could have been the No. 1 used car salesman of all time

This dude created a slightly more impressive version of Hey You Pikachu, and he acted like he created AI

I feel like, if you need to hire a personal PR team for a _single_ person, that's a pretty good sign that he's more trouble than he's worth.

Oh man, I remember this so well. Funny enough, I thought of Peter Molyneux a few months ago and started looking up info about him. Get this: he said in an interview that the reason he even got INTO software development in the first place was through deception. Back in the day, his girlfriend's dad convinced him to start a company that delivered beans to the Middle East, which he named Taurus. One day, the computer company Commodore called him out of the blue and invited him to visit their office. He was confused, but he went along anyway. They showed him the Amiga 1000 and asked him to create software for it, and he was even more confused. Eventually he realized that they had mistaken his bean delivery company for a software development company called Torus. But did he correct them? NOPE! He just ran along with it, agreed to develop software for the Amiga, and went back home to frantically learn how to program.

The craziest part is if Peter just didn’t lie and was open and honest about his accomplishments in the gaming space he’d be a legit gaming legend. He’s made some huge contributions to the culture, but he just can’t help but be a slimeball salesman.

Every single detail of this story aside, I'm still stuck on why they thought "you can be besties with a 9 year old boy" was a good premise for an all ages game of any kind.

They should have made Milo into a talking pet with interactive minigames imo. That would have instantly appealed to more people.

Every time someone utters the phrase "can't make this up", Peter Molyneux enters the room and makes it up.

"His mind is based in the cloud" is one of my new favorite quotes

I feel old knowing that we hit the age where people have forgotten Peter Molyneux as the Lord of Lies. Everyone thinks it's Todd Howard, but Peter basically created the title.

I forgot about that bit where she hands Milo the piece of paper, you couldn’t even use the Kinect unless you were 6ft away from it.

What kills me is that if you take away all the lies, the guy was still legitimately impressive. He never needed to lie about any of it lol

I can't believe Milo ruthlessly murdering a snail was one of the last things we ever saw him do

Knowing AI capabilities a decade later amaze me at how optimistic they were

I honestly think Lionhead's rocky road through the years can be largely attributed to Peters lies.

My sister and I always had this dumb scenario… Sister walks into living room: “uhh Milo, where’s my brother?” Milo: “he’s in here with me! Look!” Cuts to me having been scanned into the game and trapped as Milo’s slave. It was dumb, but we never forgot that silly senario.

Peter is obviously a genius, you are clearly a grown up Milo. He did it, what a legend. And we all doubted him.

Lmao “he tried to raise morale by changing the project name”. What a genius incredible leader

For those curious, the mispronounciation of "Natal" is intentional. Peter thought it sounded cooler and more like some secret spy shit. This creator didn't make that cringe decision

Here's how far off AI was at the time: There is still no AI that impressive as the trailer had shown and it's been 14 years. We still are not there yet.

Me: “Huh, I haven’t heard of this before. Surely it wasn’t that bad” “This is Peter Mollyneux” Me: “Oh. Got it.”

I absolutely love Peter Molyneux, because whenever his name is attached to ANYTHING you know it's gonna end making a funny video

"Project Dimitri" followed by silence and hardbass was just comedy gold 😹

They should have made a virtual dog instead! It makes so much more sense if you think about it. A dog doesnt have to understand sentenses or jokes. Instead a dog understands gestures and the tone of your voice. A dog grows up much faster, they could even make the dog grow up from puppy to adult with your "parenting". Yor can throw a ball, teach tricks, give him threats and pets. All this would be easy with the motion capture technology. I would have LOVED this as a kid and It would have been a great showcase for thair (real) technology!

Big thing is, it wasn't just Milo. A *LOT* of MS's early Natal previews advertised supposed AI capabilities, including someone talking with their AI enemy before fighting them. MS absolutely intended to market it this way.

8:40 Peter is a legend. Imagine being so good that your boss hires a team to prevent you from messing up instead of just firing you for your lies

At least Project Natal gave us one great thing. It let us see what the bottom of an avatar's shoe looked like.

I love the line in Video Game High School where Calhoun says "Who sold you that load of Molyneux?"

If I recall correctly, Peter got into game dev based on a lie. Something like he started just making business software, but his company got confused for a game studio and received a game contract. Instead of being honest, he just somehow bullshat a game out. Makes sense, tbh.

What's funny to me is that Seaman (that one weird Dreamcast game with the fish that has a human face) actually came much closer to achieving what this game promised and failed to deliver. Just imagine being beaten by a talking fish man from the Dreamcast. And now you got people making themselves AI waifus they can talk to and get a response in real time as shown in the tech demo, except that it actually works.

This opened up so many old wounds. 😂 I was so excited for Project Milo! Kept showing people the KZfaq video.

I feel old because I remember Peter Molyneux actually being celebrated as an inventive genius for "creating" Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Populous, Dungeon Keeper and that magic carpet game. That was before Lionhead and even that was heavily embellished to the point of being mostly lies.

Imagine if they actually released a detailed parenting sim where you can change the outcome and you go for the bad ending for full completion.

The first time I saw that preview for Milo was in my junior high classroom. A pair of guest speakers came in, showed us the video, and asked us "What looks dangerous here?". I was called on and answered something like, "Spending enough time talking to a computer may cause the user to disassociate with reality". The speakers responded with a confused "Uh, good guess? The answer is stranger danger." The concept of a conversational AI was so unheard of at the time, that people thought it was an avatar for a real person. People thought this, worked it into a concept for a "stranger danger/ internet safety" presentation, and sold this presentation to schools. Absurd. Glad I saw it.

I really appeciate when youtubers like you take their time to naturally tell us what happened and include pauses and breaths, as opposed to others who make it sound like they never run out of breath and sometimes also overlap the last sentence with the next one, which in turn is exhausting. This style of editing feels much more natural and friendlier to watch. Thank you for your editing decisions. ^^/

Peter seems like that guy in school who had a "girlfriend who goes to a totally different school, so you probably won't know her"

>Hears Peter Molyneux mentioned It's a matter of time until Guru Larry inevitably comments on this video

The Kinect might have been a failure as a gaming trend, but I remember all the creative and impressive ways people used them beyond gaming.

I remember being confused about what Project Natal even was at the time. Was it the camera thing, or was it this AI boy? It was so weird to announce Milo at the same time as the Kinect, because the AI shown off (if it were real) was way more impressive than a camera and microphone.

This is an incredibly done video and I loved it. Popped up in my recommended and didn’t know of you before, but I am subscribed now! You’re awesome. :)

Man i feel so bad for those programmers in his team who're like, "Wait what we can't do that!?" And are thus preassured into impossible feats

If only they waited like 12 years. They could do a project Milo in like two days slapping together gpt and a voice synthetizer AI on Unreal Engine. Edit: There's a bunch of negative commentsin this thread as if we didn't already had a bunch of mods that are simulating NPCs with gpt. Angry internet people are really funny.

Introducing Project Milo, a specialized hardware product in this giant, human-sized box. You'll need to put food and water in the slit of the chassis twice a day, and empty the waste caddie in the back every other day. Some editions of Milo will give him a Filipino or Chinese accent. If it breaks, please don't open it; just call our team of swat experts to come pick it up. Non-disclosure agreement required to purchase.

Hey man, was cool to see you use footage from my cut content project in your video! Thanks for the credit, awesome job on the video!

Damn I remember telling my science teacher about this and she made a whole lesson about its potential. Now looking back she probably knew it was bs but wanted to keep her students engaged. 😢

I still find it funny that people were surprised something Peter Molyneux of all people unveiled didn't quite turn out to be what he said it was. Like, have you ever seen anything this man has been involved with before?

ngl, you look like a grown up Milo

In some twisted nightmare timeline this game was released in full as a Mars Needs Moms tie in. Both starring creepy digital children named Milo

The only question I have left is: Did Claire succeed as an actor? After all she was good enough to fool us all.

Nothing is more embarrassing than the kinect era

Knowing now what the top executives at Microsoft was doing it makes sense they wanted to develop a small boy simulator.

Just another reason why Molyneux took his 22 Cans, ran it into the ground and left the industry. I'm sure Fable's acorn had something to do with it as well.

With all the modern AI chat models we have now this game could totally be a reality, well up until it says "as an ai model..."

The wild thing is that the Kinect was actually a pretty insane piece of motion tracking hardware, especially for the time, that was effectively created only to run Just Dance and Wii Sports knockoffs.

I guess the one question I still have about the Milo demo. Do you think it’s a pre-rendered video that’s playing on the TV or do you think it’s a pre scripted cut scene that’s actually being rendered in real time on hardware?

Bro, you look like a young Pedro Pascal! I hope this channel continues to grow :)

I was more blown away by the "scan anything and it goes into the game" than the AI

Kind of funny (and sad) to think Hey You, Pikachu! on the N64 had a more intricate voice command and AI system than Project Milo.

This is why game devs rarely talk about upcoming games anymore or want to be the public face of their game. In early E3 days before the show was open to the public, they'd regularly show journalists private demos of games under development years before release, sometimes really rough stuff that could barely even be called a game, many of which were cancelled/never released. Now adays, social media/youtubers/whatever will crucify you if the game doesn't look exactly like the demo.

I'm impressed that one comment said "I didn't expect this until 10-20 years from now". That comment was 14 years ago now, and we have the tech to potentially make something like Milo now. By 20 we definitely will. That guy was exactly on the money for how long it'd take.

I think what pisses me off the most about all this is how people who were supposed to call out his BS didn't do their job. Like, when xXxBigGamer69420xXx got hyped at this "insane" tech in the GameSpot forums, that is one thing, but even some gaming magazines were gobbling up this fairy tail lmao Todd Howard's brother from another mother, I say. Great video, king, the pacing esp. was top notch!

Peter Molyneux is basically a scifi writer ending up making videogames living in a dreamworld where the real world cannot deliver.

I remember I was in 8th grade when Project Milo was revealed and my guidance counselor who ran a lunch time Gaming/Nerd club for students showed us it and we were all fascinated and utterly blown away. Funny looking back now

Funny because Milo is actually relatively straightforward to pull off now with how powerful AI is getting.

Seaman really was ahead of it’s time compared to this, good video!

It’s kind of wild to think that we actually have gotten to a point where a game like this is actually viable as a product

It really bangs against my eardrums hearing "molly-no" instead of "molly-nyew"

This was 10 years after Dreamcast had a simulation that could register your spoken responses and remember them to ask about later. And it was about 5 years after playstation 2 had a camera that could put you onscreen in a motion fighting game.

The idea that a computer could remember a date (her mom's birthday) is jarringly unimpressive. Yet my little mind was blown at the time.

OH, that thing? i remember it. when it first appeared. i had ZERO IDEA why would anyone on the planet, or even the universe, would want to play that game with that virtual boy.

One of the neat things looking back on Milo with modern AI is the tech demo makes him seem far more advanced then models we have even now. Take Chat GBT or other similar purely text based models and they still have the issues of occasionally going on weird tangents or misremembering information. Likewise it would probably just agree and go along with any suggestion you had; the homework example used in the demo if the AI was never told it had homework once would probably still say “yeah I’m working on it.” Or something along those lines. Peter over a decade ago was suggesting he had something that is revolutionary, but not fully ready now just causally on a home console.

I was obviously late to the realization, but I’ll never forget watching a tech/gameplay demo with commentary of Fable 3 where he had the character do a full transformation into either the Angel or devil form, allowing you to walk around like that. Then the full game came out and that was relegated to a specific dialogue option where you’d briefly transform and then go back to normal before exiting dialogue. It was the first time I felt lied to by Peter, only to realize his whole career was built on promises like those that never went anywhere.

I remember showing the Milo clip to my mom and being like "this is the future you need to buy us a kinect". Fooled us both

Ai still isn't actual ai.

>biggest lie microsoft ever told >Peter Molyneux I don't know what I expected.

I think the real mystery is how Molly-no is still able to work in the business, still start up his own company and still be able to convince people to work for him.

I’ve seen a lot of content about the failure that the Kinect was but I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went. Im amazed by how in depth your research goes in every video. Not to mention your pacing and editing is just *chefs kiss.* keep on teaching. I’m here to learn.

The 'but gpt can do that now' comments has Peter rubbing his hands in glee thinking of his next scam.

Peter must be real excited by recent ai. Both as a subject he seems real interested and being able to relate at it being massively oversold

It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to just lie your way to global success and riches while I'm sitting here selling slurpees to people I hate at 711

TLDR; Peter does a Molyneux, Kinect came out a generation too early to function properly, and the unit makes for a great cheap motion capture rig.

One of my favorite feelings is finding a great new KZfaq channel and realizing they have hours of content already available 😌

According to Peter: He discovered AI doing research on several petri dishes under a microscope which contained gamer substance until one day he found the AI bacteria.

When I was 8 I watched this unveiling when my uncle showed it to me. Every day up until I was 9 I would ask for my moms phone to see what the updates were on “Milo’s World”. Then I would check every week. Then every month. Once a year. I’m in my junior year of college (majoring in Electrical Engineering) and I forgot about Milo, but hearing Milo’s voice brought back that overwhelming sense of excitement to me again. Can’t believe it was all fabricated. I believe with the works of OpenAI we can actually achieve this. I hope to be a part of it if so.

He reminds me of a friend I knew many moons ago. He was a really nice guy, wouldn't hurt a fly intentionally. Sadly he had the habit of making up things for literally no reason. My theory was that because he came from a very poor family, he felt like he had to make up things, so people would hang on his lips. Sadly this always imploded when the truth was revealed, which just made more and more people just ignore anything he says, because 90% of the time it would just be BS. Which in turn made him feel even more insecure, and thus he came up with increasingly crazy things. We had this group of friends, all in their late teens, early twenties, boys and girls, that used to hang out and do things together. I tried to involve him in things as much as possible, trying to build up his self-esteem so he wouldn't feel the need to make up lies. Let me give you one example that really floored me once. One weekend one of the girls in our group had her birthday party at her house, and of course we were all invited. He lived quite close to her, I lived on the other side of town, so he saw her a lot more than I did. Now back then I never dated anybody, I was focused on other things, so somehow never bothered having a gf, since....I don't know, it just wasn't a priority for me back then. Turns out the birthday girl had a crush on me, even though I've never (consciously) gave her or anybody else any indication that I was interested in a relationship. I was just friendly with everybody, because I enjoyed their company, and we all had a lot of fun together. For some unknown reason, mister BS decided to tell this girl, that I told him in secret, that I was going to propose to her during her birthday party that night. How he thought this was going to work out is beyond me. Anyway, I got there that night, with a nice crystal set of glasses, nicely packaged in gift paper, not having a clue what was happening. But apparently by this time everybody there "knew" that I was going to propose to her. I felt there was a bit of a weird vibe going on, her younger sisters running past me, looking at me and giggling for no reason, things like that. Things that normally didn't happen. I was like, wtf is going on!! Anyway, at some point people started handing her the gifts, so I went to get mine from the car, and when I got back, they had created like....an alley with them stading on both sides, and her at the end looking very nervous, smiling at me in a weird way, and I'm like dang!!! She must really enjoy getting gifts!! Anyway, so I gave her my gift, she opened it up with eyes positively gleaming, and then her face dropped when she saw the glasses, and everybody was murmuring confused. She just said thank you, then went inside, and I had the distinct feeling she was crying as she walked away, with the other girls helping her, patting her on the back, even though I could not imagine why. I was so confused. I literally thought she was upset about the glasses, because she somehow hated glasses as a gift or something. It was only after someone at some point explained to me what happened, that I realized what was going on. To say I was furious, would be an understatement. I immediately started looking for mr BS, but he left as soon as it hit the fan. The whole party was kinda ruined, and I went home a little later too. Anyway, after that incident I started ignoring mr BS, and eventually the group kinda dissolved, I moved away to another city on the other side of the country, and we all kinda lost contact. This was all in the 90's, so way before Facebook or other social media things. So about two years ago I decided to see how everybody in the group did, also what ever happened to the girl etc. So I started looking them all up, and long story short, she got married some years later, and had a nice family, so that all ended well. Sadly it turns out just a year or so before I tracked his profile down, mr BS hung himself at his parents house. No idea why, but if I should guess, I think he just ended up all alone, because nobody wanted to have anything to do with him, because of the havoc he created with his lies. This probably was what drove him to end it. I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. He was such a nice guy, and there was literally no reason for him to lie about anything!! People liked him because of him. Yet somehow he felt that was not enough, and he had to somehow make things "better" than what it really was. Sadly it just always ended in complete disaster. Life can be so strange sometimes.

Can't deny the contribution he has made! Sydicate, Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Dungeon keeper were in my all time top 20 list.

That black and white pet was supposed to be trainable, but i couldn't teach it anything. And fable wasn't even a full game until the greatest hits version.

my father talked about this project and tech for years, and still talks about it today! it's interesting to finally see what project milo was all about and the truth behind it! and the amount of research you put into this is impressive, it's truly great work! can't wait to see more!

I fell for this thing hook line and sinker honestly. My dad who works in tech could see right through it, but man was I In immediately. The Kinect wasn’t bad tech but utilizing it on the contemporary hardware was really just not feasible. It’s a bummer, but I do respect what the motion tracking has led to.

The problem with this project is that if you want something like this to succeed, you'd need to be willing to let the control be handed over to the player. And seeing how microsoft currently wants to be able to ban players who say things on singleplayer offline minecraft worlds and collect their data of everything being said, i bet they'd sooner choose to go bankrupt than to let people do something entertaining.

3 years of development and millions of dollars to end up with nintendogs for pedos.

What's really sad isn't just Peter Molyneux's personal failings, but that he seems to take everyone else down with him. He's a big name somehow and he's fine. But studios keep shutting down around him.

I was a manager at a busy Gamestop in 2009 and after Milo was shown it was all the customers were talking about. We thought gaming was changing in an incredible way. Then strangely enough, it just disappeared. We forgot about it and never looked back. This video reminded me of it and now I remember all the craziness again... What a time

Yep, I remember playing Black & White when it was released and I was around 14. It was very interesting for its time, but the creature training was extremely temperamental and hard to actually get to work. I remember thinking it was overhyped even back then. Theme Hospital was a big part of my childhood though. I never knew that the games I was playing were made by a compulsive liar though.

This was super interesting! You're a really good presenter dude

I love how this impossible 2009 multi million dollar game would be a trivial gimmick that someone could make at home for fun in 2023

Even though the entire core of the project was a farce, I'm still impressed by the visuals on display. The environments and lighting seem very detailed for a pre-2010 Xbox 360 game, and Milo's face actually emotes very naturally, even if it does kinda slip into the uncanny valley

Who knew it would become basically a reality today.

19:43 why was I already thinking about this before you mentioned it in the video lool

I remember this ad as a kid, and holy shit I wanted to buy kinect just to interact with the supposed AI. I was bamboozled, I felt more scammed than the investors of Theranos.