If, at this very moment, you were to fire up Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, hop into a plane, and take to the skies around Melbourne, Australia, you might be a little surprised by what you find puncturing the skyline. As discovered earlier this week, a vast 200-story residential home has unexpectedly magicked itself into existence in the otherwise not-immediately remarkable suburb of Fawkner – and now internet sleuths have figured out why.
The imposing, impossible structure has rapidly become a bit of a hotspot for curious Flight Simulator sightseers, piercing the horizon like some monstrous primordial obelisk conjured from the unknowable void. Mainly because, you know, it looks kind of neat.
The obvious problem, though, is that no such 200-storey skyscraper exists on that spot back in the real world (at least not one visible through a mortal eye), leading Flight Sim fans to ponder exactly how it got there. And now – as highlighted by duck enthusiast Liam O – diligent Twitter users, in response to a thread by Alexander Muscat, have managed to trace the origins of Fawkner’s newest landmark back to free wiki world map OpenStreetMap, and a typo.
In Microsoft Flight Simulator a bizarrely eldritch, impossibly narrow skyscraper pierces the skies of Melbourne’s North like a suburban Australian version of Half-Life 2’s Citadel, and I am -all for it- pic.twitter.com/6AH4xgIAWg
— Alexander Muscat linktr.ee/alexandermuscat (@alexandermuscat) August 19, 2020
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OpenStreetMap calls itself a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world. Anyone is free to use the site’s data, and Microsoft has been incorporating it into Bing Maps – which Flight Simulator draws upon to render its 1:1 version of Earth – since 2010.