Flight Simulator Gave Birth to 3D Video-Game Graphics

Summary

In 1999 Bill Gatespenned a moving tribute to the Wright brothers. He credited their winged invention as “the World Wide Web of that era,” one that shifted the world into a global perspective. So it’s only fitting that Microsoft later became the force behind Flight Simulator. And, like the Wrights’ original Flyer, the game’s legacy has extended beyond flight to embody the shift of perspective that flight allows. Flight Simulator promised to fit the whole world into your computer, and the game kept its promise. That’s why it has become the world’s best-selling flight-simulation franchise: The latest edition has sold more than 2 million copies. Although 2022 marked the 40th anniversary of Microsoft Flight Simulator, its lineage stretches a few years further back than its official release, in 1982. That makes it the second-oldest video-game franchise still in active development. (The Oregon Trail came out in 1971 and is still with us.) 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 focus on true-to-life depiction reflects the background of the game’s developers. Microsoft Flight Simulator: A Historyyoutube.comA passion for flight Bruce 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. It was at the university’s flight-instruction program that he met Stu Moment, who would later become his business partner. In 1976, Artwick wrote his master’s thesis on a flight simulator he’d designed to run on Digital Equipment Corp.’s PDP-11 minicomputer. Its 3D presentation could reach nine frames per second, which was outstanding for the era. Artwick then took a job with Hughes Aviation, in California, while continuing to work on 3D graphics in his free time. In 1977, he wrote an article for Kilobaud: The Small Computer Magazine describing the “Sublogic Thre...