Lionhead: Project Milo never really a game, but Fable: The Journey is

In a revealing session at Develop in Brighton, Lionhead creative director Gary Carr revealed that the shelved Project Milo began well before Kinect arrived and was never really a game - but Fable: The Journey certainly is.

"Project Milo was something in development before we'd even heard of Kinect. It was a controller game. Nobody knows that," Carr said, as reported by Eurogamer.

Although he'd just described it as a game, Carr went on to reveal that Lionhead were really just messing about with ideas.

"We played around with this for a while, and it suddenly got a lot of press coverage. It wasn't necessarily a game, it was an experiment," he said.

"It kind of got a life of its own for a while. But we stopped work on it, because really we needed to start thinking about making some money as a studio.

"Microsoft is very kind to let us beaver away on cool ideas but we cost a lot of money. So we decided to stop work on that and put it to something else, which was Fable: The Journey."

Carr's comments line up with those of studio founder Pete Molyneux, who said the experiment was scrapped because there was no place for it in the current industry. Microsoft has repeatedly described it as never having been a confirmed game or product.

That's not to say Lionhead's time went to waste; its efforts with Kinect helped fast track development on Fable: The Journey, which Carr said is one of the studio's most significant labours to date.

"We realised people didn't think we were building a long-form game. This is the biggest game we've ever made, by far," he said.

"You travel around on horseback most of the time; they go pretty fast. You're racing 30 miles through a world - you've got to build a lot of world. We've built [a world] three-times the size of the last Fable game."

Carr said doing a quick run through the game should take at least 15 hours.

"What we want to do is stop talking about Kinect. We're making a game. You don't talk about your control pad when you release Halo, you talk about the game you're making," Carr concluded.

Fable: The Journey releases exclusively for Xbox 360 and Kinect in October.