This post has nothing to do with Nintendo, but because we lost such an important industry icon today in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series, I decided to write about it anyway.

It’s true. As part of Microsoft’s “restructuring” plan today (layman’s terms: 5,000 layoffs), almost the entire Flight Simulator team was let go in one fell swoop.

I’ll never forget the day I successfully landed a Cessna for the first time (in the 1993 version or there abouts). I missed the Midway airport runway and landed in the middle of a field outside the blocky Chicago skyline, of course, but I landed without crashing nevertheless.

That future generations of geeky kids won’t be able to recreate such a feat–in a Simulator-branded game, anyway–is sad, to say the least.