MiGMan

By allowing gamers to add their own planes, landscape and missions, Microsoft’s Combat Flight Simulator 22 remains popular. Creating "add-on" aircraft and missions isn't a new phenomenon.

"Fans have been hacking into the code - sometimes with the blessing of the publisher - for a long time", says Peter Inglis of Sydney, Australia, who is in charge of the MiGMan's Flight Simulation museum, a Web site that has cataloged about 200 flight simulators from the past 20 years.

"In the 1990s", he said, "Flight Sim fans wormed their way into Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and Jane's U.S. Navy Fighter games to fly airplanes that only the computer was designed to pilot."

Inglis, a musician by trade, says that someone leaked the code to Microprose's Falcon 4 in the late 1990s, allowing dozens of people to create patches - pieces of software that fix bugs in games - and additional missions.