Steven Spielberg's LMNO Prototypes Resurface Sixteen Years After Its Cancellation
Developed between 2005 and 2010 by Electronic Arts Los Angeles with Steven Spielberg's involvement, LMNO was meant to be the studio's most ambitious action adventure on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Its entire concept revolved around Eve, an alien companion who spoke an unintelligible language and whose aura tinted the world around her to convey her mood. The bond between the two characters was supposed to evolve according to the player's actions. Deemed too ambitious and too far from completion, the project was cancelled in October 2010, leaving behind a handful of videos and plenty of second-hand accounts.
On 1 September 2026, preservation site Games That Weren't reported an unexpected find. Jason Rohrer, the author of acclaimed indie game Passage, had done consulting work for Electronic Arts on the project. Following a recent conversation about LMNO, he dug out his personal development archives and released them on GitHub. The jasonrohrer/ea-lmno repository holds source code, design notes and playable prototypes, rounded out by the data packages in ea-lmno-packages.
Above all, these archives document the famous memory dive. Rohrer was working on experimental mechanics in which the player and Eve shared memories, an idea discussed for years without anyone ever being able to touch it. What is on offer here are proofs of concept rather than finished vertical slices: they let you experiment with the raw principle instead of glimpsing the shipped version of LMNO. Build and launch instructions sit right in the repositories' accompanying files, alongside the original notes.
For preservation, this is a rare item: cancelled projects from major publishers are almost always destroyed or locked away in internal archives. This is only an outside consultant's contribution, not the full game build, which remains missing. Even so, these files finally give direct access to one of the project's most talked-about ideas.
Source: Games That Weren't