Its 3D presentation could reach nine frames per second, which was outstanding for the era. It was at the university’s flight-instruction program that he met Stu Moment, who would later become his business partner.Īrtwick wrote his master’s thesis on a flight simulator he’d designed to run on Digital Equipment Corp.’s PDP-11 minicomputer. Microsoft Flight Simulator: A History A passion for flightīruce Artwick studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, yet he found time to pursue a dream many teenagers think about but few fulfill: He learned to fly. The focus on true-to-life depiction reflects the background of the game’s developers. The heart of the franchise isn’t in gamification but in the technical spectacle it uses to simulate flight and the ground beneath you. ( The Oregon Trail came out in 1971 and is still with us.) That makes it the second-oldest video-game franchise still in active development. Microsoft Flight Simulator, its lineage stretches a few years further back than its official release, in 1982. That’s why it has become the world’s best-selling flight-simulation franchise: The latest edition has sold more than 2 million copies.Īlthough 2022 marked the 40th anniversary of Flight Simulator promised to fit the whole world into your computer, and the game kept its promise. The game’s legacy has extended beyond flight to embody the shift of perspective that flight allows. So it’s only fitting that Microsoft later became the force behind Flight Simulator. He credited their winged invention as “the World Wide Web of that era,” one that shifted the world into a global perspective. In 1999 Bill Gates penned a moving tribute to the Wright brothers.

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