Steven Spielberg conceived of the basic concept of a man escaping with an alien woman away from government agents, but he did not get involved in the nitty-gritty of game development for Project LMNO. The lack of any concrete direct may have sunk the project.
“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 ‘,” said independent developer Jason Rohrer. “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.”
“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 added. “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.”
Source: Edge
