01/08/2020 - Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - A little history

Those who know me well, know that I am a computer gaming tragic.  More specifically I am a Flight Simulator tragic.

My first flight sim was SubLogic Flight Simulator, that I ran on a IBM PC XT Clone that I bought in the mid 1980's and from the first day I flew the sim, I was hooked.

As a very much wanna be pilot, this was definitely one way I was able to fulfill my dreams that I was unable to do so professionally due to colour blindness.

The early sim was a challenge due to there not being the availability of todays plethora of peripherals, flying the sim via a keyboard (no mouse), imagining the wire frame hills and checker board land below was something approaching reality, was a bigger challenge.

Despite that, every couple of years, a new and slightly improved version was released which gave me hope that true VFR (visual flight rules) flight would be possible.

In the Microsoft world, the last complete release of Flight Simulator was on 13th October 2006.  That pretty much was the last time I was really excited anticipating the release of a new sim.  FSX promised much and in the long run, with the aid of some very talented third party developers, actually delivered quite a reasonable flight experience.

However by the time that occurred, the core sim was quite long in the tooth and was in fact showing it's age, despite some significant computing power being thrown at it.

For around the last five to six years, I have dabbled with some of FSX's competitors, but none gave me that same sense of wonder I felt with each new version of MSFS. 

Then in September 2019, everything changed.  One evening while surfing around You_Tube, I came across a video that completely blew my mind. Initially I dismissed it as a fake, one of the many purpoted "next great thing in simming" video that infected YT on a regular basis.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this was the real deal.  Microsoft and Asobo Studios were announcing their collaboration to deliver a new iteration of Microsoft Flight Simulator.  The original preview was so amazing that I couldn't quite accept this was actually possible.

But it was...

(More tomorrow) Around 400 hours to the release of FS2020