Who put that there? Flight Simulator users find the world's strangest landmarks

The building stood 212 storeys high, piercing the skyline like some kind of alien monument. The pilots who discovered it while flying over a quiet Melbourne suburb quickly reported their findings on forums and social media, drawing other fascinated spectators. Soon, they were visiting in their thousands.

The building is not real – it exists only within Flight Simulator 2020, the latest in Microsoft’s 35-year-old series. And what players quickly realised was that it was the product of a slight mathematical error. Flight Simulator bases its reproduction of the entire surface of the planet on data from a range of sources including the OpenStreetMap, an open source mapping application maintained by volunteers. One such volunteer, Australian student Nathan Wright accidentally entered a particular building height as 212 storeys rather than 12. No one corrected it, so the Flight Simulator program used the data as it stood. Hence: super skyscraper.

Very quickly, other anomalies were discovered on the virtual planet – and shared around the community. Roads depicted as rivers, palm trees as eerie stone monoliths, vast chasms with landing strips at the bottom. “Our first reaction was, oh my God,” recalls lead software engineer Martial Bossard. French studio Asobo had spent several years on the project, with the aim of making the most authentic flight simulation ever constructed. They worked with aircraft manufacturers, pilots and researchers to get the details right. So the Airbus A320 flies like an Airbus A320, and, if you disengage the many pilot assists, you’ll need to be an experienced simmer to take off and land it. What would serious sim enthusiasts make of these data-driven oddities?

As it turned out, they loved them. Most people weren’t reporting sightings of strange buildings or land formations to complain; they were enjoying their discoveries, the sense of finding things in the world that no one else had ever seen. As a species, we love myths, we love the idea of mysterious, uncanny places; amid a global pandemic that has seriously restricted people’s ability to travel, here was a game that allowed travellers to share fresh experiences and to create new mythologies. “You can’t do quality assurance on the entire Earth,” says Bossard. “It would take 14 years to fly over the surface. Our system works pretty well but sometimes you have glitches. After our initial shock we realised people understand that the perfect world isn’t possible.”

Soon after the Australian monolith was discovered, pilots were attempting to land on the rooftop – it became a landmark challenge, a way of showing extreme handling abilities. “I thought that was delightful,” says head of Microsoft flight simulations, Jorg Neumann. “That’s the thing with flying and flight sims – they’re sometimes perceived as super serious, but flying itself is fun. Pilots will tell you this: yes it’s technical, but it’s fun.”

And this jocular, sportive approach to Flight Simulator has continued. People have been recreating historic flights and famous movie scenes such as the chase in North by Northwest; they have developed a mod to put Godzilla in the San Francisco bay; they have been investigating Area 51 and other forbidden areas. Flight Simulator is now an experimental performance space.

“I’m doing it, too!” laughs Neumann. “I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan, so I flew over New Zealand and filmed every location used in the films. In the Oceania trailer, there’s one shot I took of the volcano on the South Island in the rain – it looks just like Mount Doom. I’m somewhat surprised no one has fully recreated an entire movie yet.”

Users are also creating their own challenges and activities in the sim. The multiplayer mode allows groups of friends to fly together and naturally this has become competitive. One YouTuber has played hide and seek through the streets of Manhattan; there have been groups of 40 planes taking part in chases. “What I think are fascinating are the community fly-ins, which are happening all the time,” says Neumann. “Everyone flies to a particular airport, cuts their engines, and then they attempt to glide in.”

There are players who take on long-haul flights together, taking it in turns to control a single plane as it flies in real-time across the planet. “I know there’s been a 16-hour flight,” says Neumann. “It was three pilots taking it in turns. They even dressed up in uniforms – it was great!”

This spirit of experimentation has been taken to its extreme by game developer Rami Ismail, who recently coded an app entitled Twitch Plays Flight Simulator. Anyone watching a Twitch stream of Rami’s flight can help control the plane simply by typing commands into the chat window: the challenge is that everyone watching is trying to type commands at the same time, so a consensus needs to be formed to even get the thing off the ground, let alone fly it. “Flight Simulators are a special genre in that a large part of the userbase are enthusiasts who create custom hardware and software to create more immersive and accurate physical cockpits and flight controls,” explains Ismail. “I read into that, dug up some old code for a Twitch bot I’d written in 2015, and just sort of mashed it together until it worked. The first version was done in hours.”

Twitch Plays Flight Simulator viewers have managed to fly and land a range of aircraft, and Ismail says it has taught him some interesting lessons about cooperation. “I think a lot of people who join the stream want to make the plane crash, but seeing the chat try to keep this behemoth of a machine airborne convinces a lot of them that keeping the plane flying is way more interesting,” he says.

“There are continuous fights over the landing gear, which will deploy and retract randomly as people compete over the controls. At other times, small alliances of players can take control of the simulation – sometimes for good, sometimes not so much.”

When I ask Neumann and Bossard where most players are choosing to fly right now, it seems they are following classic tourist routes. “One thing I’ve seen in the data recently is that clearly people like the Caribbean and Hawaii,” says Neumann. “I think it’s because they can’t freely travel to relaxing vacation spots. It’s the islands … that’s where people are going. The Bahamas is one giant bright green strip on our data map.”

But what a large section of the player base really enjoys, is finding odd new ways to experience the world and sharing them with others. “It shows the spirit of the audience more than anything,” says Neumann. “There’s clearly room in people’s hearts to have fun.”