For the past decade, I've spent every week of my life in the air. I have flown obscene distances, made extreme layovers, and seen airports in countries in all continents. I've spent my days in different cultures & languages & realities.

I miss it. COVID-19 has had me locked down in the Netherlands since the start of March, and since the end of March, it's been the longest time I've been in a single country since 2010. Flight life is rough, but I love where it took me.

Flight allowed me incredible access to the world. To perspective, and culture, and music, and food, and mythology, and people. Most of my friends live abroad, and I've felt isolated despite growing slightly accustomed to being in one home.

But the sense of loss feels connected to missing that sense of an airplane accelerating. Of looking out a window and not knowing where I am, or what the lives of those tiny houses in the distance are like. The lights of a city at night.

So, the game I've been dying to talk about is Flight Simulator 2020. It is the most unique game development achievement I have ever come across. For the past few months I've been testing the game, and just now, it launched.

I'll try to not use hyperbole here, so I'll just say Flight Simulator as a games project is unique, unparalleled, and almost impossible to comprehend. It links technologies never linked this way before. It evokes feelings that games never could before.

Flight Simulation can generally be interesting for two reasons. The first one is the romanticism of mastering a complex machine to balance the physics and processes to achieve the magical result of flight.

The other type of beauty of flight is the notion that one could go anywhere, that you can sonder about people's lives thousands of feet below you, watch a sunset over unknown lands, or see your world from a new perspective.

The first is common in Flight Simulators. But no flight simulator has ever achieved that second feeling, because up until now, you could not recreate Earth in-game. Flight Simulator 2020 recreates Earth. I'm not even exaggerating. It's Earth. It's staggering. It is all there.

And you know what, any place I've gone to from all of my thousands of trips, at the very worst, looks and feels 'pretty convincing' as you soar over it.

It creates a sort of second-level sondering - instead of wondering what people's lives are like in the houses below, you wonder what the houses look like in real life - and then what the lives of the people that presumably live in there are like. I can stare at it forever.

This is achieved through a remarkable mix of photogrammetry, the cloud, AI generation, literally all of Bing, and ton of clever modeling. It's garnished with dozens of live partnerships with weather data, flight data, and tons more. The developer in me is impossibly impressed.

You want to fly over your own house to check the weather? You can. Any other house on Earth? You can too. That cute little place from that one trip? It's there. It's all there. I cannot stress how remarkable it is that it's all there.

You want to fly along with a friends' transatlantic flight? You'll land less than 20 minutes apart, flying similar routes, in similar conditions. I know because I did. Twice, with layovers, down to the gates.

You see a real airplane fly over outside your window? You can probably click it on the World Map, and fly that exact route in the simulation, same conditions. You want AI-powered Air Traffic Control? You can do that. Want real people? That's possible too.

But all of that wouldn't matter if the flight was bad, and I can report that Flight Simulator is also just a really fun flight simulator. Accessibility was clearly a goal for Asobo, and you can start flying with minimal flight experience.

A super-well executed training mode runs you through the basics the same way your first real-life pilot practice would go - down to hearing some similar jokes and anecdotes & exercises from my first real-life training flight a decade ago.

From there, when you understand the basics, you can literally spin the globe and get going whereever you want, in a huge selection of aircraft. Want to start, engines off, at a gate? Can do. Want to start mid-approach to Dubai Intl? Sure.

You know how to fly and want a challenge? Set everything to realistic, turn off the assists, and aviate tough routes, and difficult approaches. Or if you don't, let an AI co-pilot continue the flight and admire the views while you do work on a second screen.

Finally, this is clearly just the start of something. Asobo and Microsoft haven't created just a game, they've created the future platform for flight simulation - including content manager and a marketplace for third party providers.

For me, Flight Simulator is a gift unlike any other. It's given me back the feeling of World, so small and infinitely large at the same time. I cannot put it to words, neither as a developer, as former pilot-in-training, and as a traveler. It's an impossible game, but it's real.