Microsoft Flight Sim Bugs Hint at Terrifying Alternate Earth

Microsoft Flight Sim released yesterday, giving quarantine-stricken players an opportunity to explore a complete 1:1 scale Earth in real-time from the comfort of their homes. The Bing Maps-powered illusion is usually pretty seamless, but some players are now finding bugs that feel like “glitches in the Matrix.” Like viewing into an alternate earth, these point to what are certainly Eldritch secrets sitting just beneath the game world’s multi-petabyte surface.

Take this obelisk Twitter user Alexander Muscat found towering over Northern Melbourne during a flight. Definitely not present in real-life, this impossibly narrow skyscraper certainly isn’t there to take part in any demonic rituals, no sir. 

Here’s some night shots, courtesy Michael McMaster.

And if you’re brave enough to touch it, Conor O’Kane shows that you can land on it.

Meanwhile, Redditor u/thallada found some innovative highway construction in their game. Spider-Man, eat your heart out.

In all seriousness, the amount of detail and freedom in this game is simply stunning, so it’s easy to forgive the occasional map bug. To be honest, I kind of hope Microsoft keeps them in. Who knows? Maybe the dark tower has existed all along, and we’ve simply forgotten until now.

That said, Microsoft posted last night that it is aware of issues players are having with the game and is working to fix them. Rather than the world map, though, these mostly apply to long installation times or even installations failing to complete. These problems are somewhat understandable, given the massive 150GB of data the game needs, though some Steam reviews are upset given that the long installation time makes it impossible to get any game time in underneath Steam’s two hour refund window.