Twitch plays Microsoft Flight Simulator, lands plane safely

The internet continues to go wild for Microsoft Flight Simulator, the latest proof of which is that it's joined the likes of Pokemon and Dark Souls as a game that can be played by the Twitch chat hivemind. Twitch plays Flight Simulator is the work of game developer Rami Ismail, formerly of Vlambeer, who made it overnight and has been adding additional controls as required by the players in chat.

You might think a group of randos in a chat room would struggle to agree with each other long enough to issue sensible commands to a bot flying a plane on their behalf, and sometimes you'd be right. But they have managed a complete flight, piloting a Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner as it took off from Košice, Slovakia, flew around for an hour, and then landed safely at back at Košice International Airport. They came in a little early on the landing, but otherwise were successful.

Perhaps more impressively, they survived doing a barrel roll over the ocean. If Twitch chat can pull this off, the rest of us have no excuse.

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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