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'The idea was to try as much as possible not to break anything,' says Bossard. There's even a legacy mode that lets you play with the older simulation model while enjoying all the visual splendour that's now been layered on top, and for Flight Simulator X veterans there's a commitment to make sure some of the more intricate set-ups are supported from day one. We stood on this wonderful platform and we try to try to improve it wherever we go.' 'We just made it better one layer at a time. Indeed, why would you throw away something that's supported by a community of players and third-party developers that's still thriving some 14 years on? 'We benefited a tonne from that because basically, from day one, the sim worked,' says Neumann.

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DF will be along soon to give you a full rundown of the tech side of things.

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You'll find a lot of code from Flight Simulator X in there, even right now.' FSX was notoriously difficult to run back in the day, but Flight Sim 2020 is a much more forgiving affair - I was able to run high-end settings on a 1660ti and i5-9400, and you'll get decent results out of a 970. 'We had the chance to talk to some of these guys - and to select layers to improve. 'The idea was to understand everything that had been written, and with a lot of respect to the team that did that,' Martial Bossard, lead technical engineer at Asobo, the lead developers of Flight Sim 2020, tells us.

This new Microsoft Flight Simulator is of course intended for console at some point - though there's no real further detail on an Xbox release just yet - but first and foremost it's a continuation of the PC's longest-running series, and built upon the foundation of Flight Simulator X. So I don't think that was the reason - our focus just shifted over to console.' But Flight Sim X was certainly a very successful product, both critically and financially. We always re-evaluate priorities - I wasn't actually around back in 2007, but when Aces Team essentially was divested, the priorities were just different. 'I don't know if flight simulators went out of fashion as such. 'I mean, we did have Microsoft Flight in the middle of it all,' Microsoft's head of Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann says in wry reference to 2012's failed reboot.

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And, for one reason or another, the last entry in the series was Flight Simulator X back in 2006.

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It predates Windows - the first entry came back in 1982, though you can trace its heritage back even further to Bruce Artwick's pioneering work in the late 70s - and is as quintessentially Microsoft as Encarta: an open-armed, technically astute piece of software that offers an education in the pleasures and particulars of flight. Think of Microsoft and video games and you might think that Halo's the flagship, though I've often thought Flight Simulator is where you'll find its real heart.

But there's an alchemy here that goes beyond bullet point feature lists or plain numbers, blending together to create one of those rare wow moments that come along once a generation, or that maybe herald the next. Microsoft Flight Simulator isn't the first game to pull in real-world map or weather data to make for a more authentic simulation, nor is it the first game to try and bring us the entire world. I step away from the controls and out into my garden, slightly dizzy from it all, only to see the sky has darkened to the exact same shade of hazy blue as the one I was just flying through. In a video game, for what I'm pretty sure is the very first time. Then it's simply a case of looking out for the cluster of buildings that marks Lewisham to the right, dipping right then left once again to pick up the Waterlink Way. Skimming The O2, then grazing the tips of Canary Wharf's mob of skyscrapers before banking left over the Isle of Dogs, buzzing the Royal Naval College as we head up over Greenwich Park and then Blackheath as London blooms into parkland south of the Thames. Heading out from London City Airport in the nimble, aerobatic Extra 330LT, and up into the late evening sky to see the sun melt into the horizon. Of course, the first thing I do in the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is fly over my house.

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