Of all major game publishers, Nintendo is the one most associated with bizarre controls. From the Virtual Boy to the Wiimote, Nintendo's history is studded with unorthodox new ways to play games — some far more successful than others. But one of the biggest attempts to change the way we interact with games came from a Nintendo competitor, and while it didn’t work out as planned, it paved the way for more accessible games in the long run.
On November 4, 2010, Microsoft released the Kinect, a controller for the Xbox 360 that uses a camera to track players’ movements and translate them into games. The Kinect was first revealed as Project Natal at E3 2009. Of the demos shown off, the most memorable is Project Milo, a simulation game by Peter Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios. Project Milo’s demo featured a player interacting with a child on screen, who was guided by the game’s artificial intelligence to react to the player’s words and movements realistically. As has so often been the case with Molyneux’s games, the big promises of Project Milo never came to light, and the game was eventually canceled.
While Project Milo was never released, Project Natal was renamed Kinect and released the following year. According to Molyneux, the sticking point with Project Milo was technology. Earlier this year, the developer told audiences at the Nordic Game 2025 conference that it all came down to cost. As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, Molyneux said that a version of the Kinect that could actually power the game would cost thousands of dollars, so Microsoft was forced to significantly scale back its ambitions. That led to the Kinect being focused on simple party games, a far cry from the complex simulation that was originally pitched as Project Milo.
The simplified version of Kinect that released might not have been as big of a step forward as it was first thought, but it was still plenty popular. The device was priced at $149.99, on top of the $299.99 price for the lowest-tier Xbox 360 console, but despite that expense, it sold well at launch. Reviews were also positive, noting that while it had trouble tracking movements in some situations and suffered from some lag, it was a novel control system that was far beyond any existing motion-tracking system for games. Aside from its price, the biggest hurdle most reviewers pointed out is that the large amount of storage space required for setup, which means it could be unusable for some players.
The simplification of Kinect’s technology also meant that the kinds of games it could play were limited. The Kinect eventually received ports of games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and NBA 2K13, but far more interesting were the games made natively for the peripheral. Kinect Adventures was built from the ground up on physical interactions, and Kinect Sports was essentially Xbox’s answer to Wii Sports. But maybe the most memorable game to use the controller is Kinect Star Wars. On top of activities you’d expect, like waving a lightsaber around with motion controls, it includes an infamous dance sequence featuring both popular songs and Star Wars-themed parodies, the best known of which has Han Solo dancing to a parody of “Ridin’ Solo” and singing his own name over and over.
Despite its popularity at launch, the Kinect was short-lived. The original version came near the end of the Xbox 360’s life, and a successor was developed for the Xbox One. At first, Microsoft planned for the Xbox One to require a Kinect to run, but backlash from potential players changed that plan. Instead, it was shipped as an optional accessory, and this time, it wasn’t nearly as successful. While Microsoft wouldn’t discontinue the Kinect until 2017, its decline had started within a few years of its release, and by a few years after its launch, few additional games would be released for the device (one of the most notable exceptions being Strange Scaffold’s Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, released in 2021).
The Kinect might not have stuck around, but it reportedly played a part in pushing Microsoft to consider accessibility in controls. Since it offers controls that are very different from traditional button inputs, it offered a viable alternative for disabled players who found typical controllers difficult, according to Axios. As Xbox head Phil Spencer told the outlet, the Kinect helped Xbox’s designers consider accessibility more than they had before its launch. For many players, the Kinect may be little more than an oddity, but we may have the strange, abandoned device to thank for beginning to open gaming up to a whole new group of players.
