Twitch Plays Microsoft Flight Simulator successfully lands first flight

Twitch chat isn't the worst pilot (yet)

Let’s be real – it was just a matter of time before Twitch plays Microsoft Flight Simulator became a reality. From the plane game‘s dedicated audience, to the in-depth controls, and potential for disaster, it’s a concept ripe for entertainment. The crowd-controlled livestream took its first flight this week, and remarkably, didn’t crash.

The de-facto official Twitch plays Microsoft Flight Simulator livestream was set up by game developer Rami Ismail. Like previous versions of the interactive stream, the chat are given a set of command prompts they can input to make the game perform certain actions. The inputs are taken in the order they appear, and the only way to make sure something is done is if the chat is more or less unanimous. As you might imagine, this is sometimes rare, and often leads to complete meltdown.

Surprisingly, this isn’t the case as yet. The Twitch chat managed to complete a one hour flight, with take-off, and relatively smooth landing. Only the inputs from those subscribed to Ismail’s channel count, to help ease the flow if the stream gets suddenly popular, and the plane is flying in auto-pilot, but the whole endeavour has only been in the air for a day, so there’s room for things to get more complicated.

This Twitch plays joins a growing canon that includes Teamfight Tactics, Hearthstone, and Fallout 3. Twitch plays Pokémon was one of the major progenitors of the trend, an experiment that led to Twitch chat catching them all, bless ’em.

You can watch the entire first flight below:

We loved Microsoft Flight Simulator in our review. If you want to make your own piloting that bit more riveting, you can mod in Godzilla.