Animal Crossing and Pokemon Snap inspired Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 borrows animal models from Frontier's Planet Zoo

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 / Microsoft

Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, used to work at Frontier, the team behind Elite: Dangerous and Planet Zoo. So when Microsoft and Asobo Studio decided to improve the fidelity of Flight Sim’s recreation of Earth, he called his former colleagues and asked them to break open the cages. 

“I called Jonny (Watts, Frontier CEO),” Neumann tells me. “I just said, ‘Can I have your animals?’ I gave him some money for it. Collaboration in gaming is awesome.” 

Asobo combines these models and their behavior from Planet Zoo with open-sourced data about animal species, migrations, and the quirks of each species (sheep will head inside when it’s raining, for example), all scientifically accurate. Then these population maps change with the seasons because, after all, this is a simulation in the rawest sense of the word, from the avionics to the orbit of the Earth. But the original idea didn’t come from somewhere quite so hardcore and intimidating. 

“The games I based that on were Animal Crossing and Pokemon Snap,” Neumann explains. “I love both. I collected every fish [in Animal Crossing]. It’s really just about finding the detail and delight.

“I had a producer call me the other day from Asobo because they’re all like, ‘Why are we doing all these animals?’ And she said, ‘I found a giraffe. It was awesome.’ 

“It makes you happy – that’s why we’re doing it.” 

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 / Microsoft

I’ve always wondered why this doesn’t happen more often. All of those digital worlds, characters, machines, and gadgets created by hundreds of game studios, all those mechanics, sounds, and systems – used once and then thrown into a vault. Imagine a world where companies like Rockstar could share their open worlds so that other studios could create games inside them. Bliss. 

As with anything in game development, the reasoning behind this lack of collaboration is often more complex than it first seems, from engine incompatibility to development pipelines. As much as the Microsoft Flight Simulator team would love to share its digital twin of Earth, most of it exists in the cloud. Some of it technically doesn’t even belong to them. 

• Read more: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s career mode uses AI voices

“It’s two petabytes of data,” Neumann says. “We don’t own the satellite data. We rent it from satellite companies because it refreshes every three years you go around the entire planet.” 

Neumann instead sees Microsoft Flight Simulator as a platform “like Roblox”. Already, they’ve hired brilliant modding teams to work on the game, but there are other teams out there creating wild, inventive things on the Microsoft Flight Simulator marketplace, where players can share their creations. He tells me there are trains and other land vehicles, boat carriers, sci-fi spaceships, and other hidden gems tucked away. With the increase in fidelity landing in the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 update, the ground vehicles will be even more fun, too, thanks to terrain deformation and higher polygon counts, making for more complex topography. 

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 / Microsoft

Who knows where the community will take Flight Sim next. 

Two years ago, a mechanic, Mike Patey, created a search and rescue aircraft called The Scrappy, a propeller plane with a motorbike strapped to each wing. 

“Can we do The Scrappy?” Neumann asks. “Sure, it’ll be fun. We can take this further, but right now we need to pay attention to the core audience and give them what they want and need. That’s the number one thing. And then beyond that, we can evolve it. I don’t think Microsoft or Asobo has to do all this work. Other people can do the work. Just do stuff.

“Plenty of people say, ‘Hey, why don’t you make a golf game [in Flight Simulator]?’ I think it’s important to be humble. It’s better for us to say: this is an open platform. If people really want to make a golf sim inside, awesome, put it in the marketplace. You have a distribution platform, you have everything. Just go make it. I don’t think we should hold that back.”