Ever Given, the massive container ship that captivated the world after blocking Egypt’s Suez Canal for more than a week, is free as of 3:05 p.m. local time, but the ridiculous incident will live on forever in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Over the last few days, the dedicated Microsoft Flight Simulator community has released several third-party mods to highlight the Ever Given’s previously precarious position. These add-ons range from simply blocking the Suez Canal with a realistic model of the ship to replicating the traffic jam its grounding caused on the shipping route. A search of Flightsim.to also turned up a refloated version of the Ever Given, one of the first steps crews took before eventually removing the ship from the actual waterway.
While it may have been a little hard to appreciate the sheer size of the Ever Given from photography alone, these Microsoft Flight Simulator mods do a fantastic job of giving players—and those of us without the expensive rigs to run the popular game—a chance to get up close and personal with this historic event. The video above, for instance, puts the viewer in the cockpit of a helicopter doing a pass on the accidentally grounded ship, an experience that’s available to very few of us in the real world.
And that’s really the beauty of Microsoft Flight Simulator: It gives players the opportunity to travel a fairly faithful version of our planet from the comforts of their own homes. Sure, world events like this one have to be added in by the users themselves, but it certainly beats walking unfamiliar streets in Google Maps or watching a single stop sign on Twitch.
(h/t Input)