New Video Game Simulates Being a Passenger on a Six-Hour Flight

Some video games put you in the shoes of a soldier in the midst of combat. Others let you take on the role of an adventurer, navigating environments most people will never visit. Still others offer forays into the distant past or the far future. But only one video game takes you to perhaps the most harrowing location of all: a seat on an airliner taking a six-hour flight.

That’s the premise of Airplane Mode, a new video game due out for Steam in 2020. At Gizmodo, Andrew Liszewski has the details. “Players experience take off and landing, snacks, meals, passengers and flight crew moving about, crying babies, unreliable wifi, turbulence, and changing weather, and even delays, which are all random so every flight feels like a different grueling experience,” Liszewski writes.

Airplane Mode is the first offering from AMC Games — in other words, it’s the first video game from the gaming wing of the network that gave us Breaking Bad. Does that sound weird? It’s a little weird. But, as several gaming journalists have pointed out, there’s a precedent for this.

That precedent is called Desert Bus, and it’s best-known for being a never-released video game from the minds of Penn and Teller. Simon Parkin wrote about it in The New Yorker in 2013, and it sounds like one of those things that’s amazing conceptually and would be an utter nightmare to actually experience.

“Finishing a single leg of the trip requires considerable stamina and concentration in the face of arch boredom: the vehicle constantly lists to the right, so players cannot take their hands off the virtual wheel; swerving from the road will cause the bus’s engine to stall, forcing the player to be towed back to the beginning,” Parkin wrote. “The game cannot be paused.”

Gizmodo reports that Airplane Mode can also be seen as part of the Desert Bus For Hope 2019 fundraiser on November 12. Who knew that video games, boredom and charity could make for such an amazing combination?

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