Independent developer Jason Rohrer has said that Project LMNO, the cancelled collaboration between Electronic Arts and Steven Spielberg, suffered from a lack of leadership, with the revered Hollywood director taking a limited role in the game's development.
Little was ever known about Project LMNO. Speaking to us at the Montreal International Games Summit yesterday Rohrer, a consultant on the project, admitted his involvement was limited, but that his impression was that creative leads Doug Church and Randy Smith tried in vain to implement Spielberg's vague vision for the game.
"I was brought in as a consultant," he told us. "I only went to their studio [EA LA] for one day then telecommuted with them after that. But I got to sit in on some of those conference meetings they have. It was an interesting project, it seemed like it had some potential, was doing something cool.
"It was about a relationship between two characters and some aspect of that relationship they had an idea for, generally, like: 'We want to have this other game system in here but we haven't developed it at all, we haven't even designed it…Jason, think of something. What would you stick in here?'.
"So, I came up with ideas that were totally not what they expected and totally interesting to them, prototyped some of them, and then I stopped hearing from them. A couple of months later I heard they were all getting laid off."
That portrays a project full of ideas but with no vision of how to implement them; no great surprise with a film director at the helm, but Spielberg was rarely at the studio. With no constant leadership, the project was destined for trouble.
"It just seemed strange and ineffective, the way they would get these big groups of people together," Rohrer said. "Even to design an important, core part of the game, they would have all these people kind of tossing [ideas around]…I was in one of those sessions.
"Low-level producers, lead creative directors and everybody else in between would be in the room, batting ideas back and forth, and it was like, where's the cohesive creative vision, the person who says, "No, it's gotta be this way'? They didn't really have that. Even the lead creative positions - Doug Church and Randy Smith - were kind of sharing that position. Which is a strange way of doing things.
"Spielberg was of course the big creative vision behind the whole thing but he wasn't even there! He would come in every week or so and meet with them and see what they were doing, but he wasn't there when I was there and I never got to talk to him or see him or anything.
"He wasn't being very hands-on, so it was kind of Doug and Randy trying to interpret his vision and show things to him and it kind of felt like it lacked direction. That's what I would say. Maybe that's why it kind of failed in the end."
EA quashed rumours of Project LMNO's cancellation in June 2009, insisted it remained "deeply committed to its collaboration with Steven Spielberg." It eventually confirmed the project had been canned last October, saying: "EA maintains its relationship with Steven Spielberg [but] has ceased development of LMNO."