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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Flight Simulator "buys the farm"

Yeager air combat one of my favourite combat flight simulators would prompt me that I "bought the farm" every time I crashed my plane on a field. The oldest and best flight simulator series Microsoft Flight Simulator "bought the farm" a few days ago when Microsoft fired all the stuff of development studio (Aces) behind the series as part of a 5000 people job cut.

Flight simulator series crashed and burned

The series future is unclear but I am not very optimistic since all the people responsible for one of, the very few, Microsoft's, quality pieces, of software are jobless now. I suspect though, that soon enough these people will find a new home in another company to continue their work.

The series started in 1982, more than a quarter of a century ago, and span 12 major releases. I remember playing my first flight simulator game on my dad's 8086 computer. Such a shame for a historic game series.

Microsoft in the past year has closed almost all the game studios the company owned namely Bungie, Digital Anvil, FASA and Ensemble. All these studios produced hit games such as Age of Empires, Freelancer and Halo.

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