Online Contents February 2009

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AVAILABLE ONLINE 1 FEBRUARY

Carware

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Flight Simulator Gave Birth to 3D Video-Game Graphics

40 years on, Flight Simulator is the greatest long-running, platform-jumping, gravity-defying video game ever

11 min read
Flight Simulator Gave Birth to 3D Video-Game Graphics

This screenshot from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 showsa biplane banking to the left.

Josef Havlik
Red

In 1999 Bill Gatespenned a moving tribute to the Wright brothers. He credited their winged invention as “the World Wide Web of that era,” one that shifted the world into a global perspective. So it’s only fitting that Microsoft later became the force behind Flight Simulator.

And, like the Wrights’ original Flyer, the game’s legacy has extended beyond flight to embody the shift of perspective that flight allows. Flight Simulator promised to fit the whole world into your computer, and the game kept its promise. That’s why it has become the world’s best-selling flight-simulation franchise: The latest edition has sold more than 2 million copies.

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