Why is Microsoft reviving Flight Simulator now?

And while it carries the weight of an iconic series, it feels like it came from nowhere. This is a full-throttle effort from Microsoft to re-create the natural world and the magic of flight. I’ve been playing a pre-release alpha version for a couple of weeks, and it’s frankly astonishing. The new title, developed by French studio Asobo and simply called Microsoft Flight Simulator, is an ambitious attempt to leverage Microsoft’s Bing Maps data and Azure-powered procedural generation technology to render our planet in unprecedented detail. In just a few weeks, though, Microsoft is releasing perhaps the biggest upgrade to the series in its 38-year history. A 2012 free-to-play spinoff called Microsoft Flight was less than well-received. The last release, Flight Simulator X, came out in 2006, and a few years later, its developer, Aces Game Studio, was closed as part of widespread layoffs at Microsoft. It’s also a brand that the company has more or less ignored in the past decade-plus. It is one of Microsoft’s all-time iconic brands. But for me, for a while in the ‘90s at least, I would have immediately answered “Flight Simulator.” Microsoft Flight Simulator is the very first thing I can remember ever doing on a computer, sat on my granddad’s lap as we soared across blocky landscapes together with a Sidewinder joystick. Let’s play a quick game of word association: Microsoft - Windows? Excel? Xbox? All solid answers.

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