LMNO

LMNO was the working title for a video game in development by EA Los Angeles, notable for Steven Spielberg's involvement in the project.^[1]

The partnership with Spielberg, first announced in 2005, was to produce an action game with an aim to evoke emotion, described as "a mix of first-person parkour movement with adventure and role-playing elements and escape-focused gameplay, all involving the player's relationship with an alien-looking character named Eve".^[1] According to Sébastien Mitton, the art director at Arkane Studios, the story had the player-character rescue Eve from a government laboratory on the east coast of the United States and help her escape on a road trip to the west coast trying to keep her alien nature hidden from encounters with other humans, which he described as a very typical Spielberg story.^[2] As a requirement of Spielberg, the game would have lacked gunplay, instead allowing the player to avoid combat by solving puzzles or if necessary resorting to hand-to-hand fighting. The game also had focused on characterization and expressions with player decisions having impacts on how the game progressed.^[2]

EA Los Angeles, which Spielberg had collaborated with before, brought established talent from other studios to help on the project, including Doug Church, Randy Smith, Habib Zargarpour, and Jason Rohrer.^[3] They also brought in Arkane Studios to help with at least one level, that of a western truck stop.^[2] The project was officially announced as cancelled in late 2010,^[4] although sources place the actual date that work ceased on the project as being around a year earlier.^[1][5]

Details about LMNO, including preliminary gameplay footage, were revealed as part of a larger documentary on Arkane Studios released by Noclip in May 2020.^[2]

• Hollywood and the video game industry