Microsoft Releases New Flight Simulator

Fourteen years ago, Steve Ballmer was Microsoft's CEO. Windows Vista was released. The company was in the middle of a decade where it struck out on mobile, search, and social. On the bright side, the Xbox 360 had been on the market for a year—and Microsoft launched the tenth installment of its Flight Simulator game.

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled a new Flight Simulator with all the bell and whistles:

• A new graphics engine that was first inspired by a HoloLens AR project
• Azure cloud services and AI
• Bing (!) Maps. Microsoft partnered with Asobo Studio to recreate the entire world in 3D.
• Flight Simulator is available in the Xbox Game Pass bundle.
• VR support is coming in the fall.

In its latest installment of the 38-year-old franchise, Microsoft seamlessly layered new technologies into a rather obscure product line (Flight Simulator requires a powerful PC to play). Maybe Microsoft has additional use cases in mind for the digital twin of Earth that it’s developed...

+ Throwback: Watch this trailer to see how Flight Simulator’s graphics have progressed over the years.