- Primary Subject: Abandoned simulators and their community continuations (Falcon BMS 4.38, Richard Burns Rally with RallySimFans, Microsoft Train Simulator with Open Rails, Combat Flight Simulator 3, IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 with BAT, Silent Hunter III with GWX Knight's Cross)
- Key Update: Volunteer teams have kept six simulators running and updated long after their developers or publishers stopped supporting them.
- Status: Evergreen
- Last Verified: October 8, 2026
- Quick Answer: Volunteer projects such as Falcon BMS, RallySimFans, Open Rails, the BAT modpack, and GWX Knight's Cross keep abandoned simulators running and updated.
In May 2023, MicroProse announced it had bought back the rights to the Falcon series.
The same announcement paused to thank Benchmark Sims, the volunteer team that had kept Falcon 4.0 alive for two decades, promising that with MicroProse's support "there is no end in sight for the work of the BMS Team."
Rescues like that run all through the simulator genre. Some of these games are still on sale, and some aren't, but every one of them lost official support years ago. The people keeping them running today are players.
Falcon BMS turned a leaked codebase into a licensed simulator
I played Falcon 4.0 as a kid with no real idea how to fly it properly. Getting off the runway and back down again was the entire game for me, and every clean landing felt like a win.
MicroProse released Falcon 4.0 in 1998, and its source code leaked two years later. Benchmark Sims formed in 2003 and built on that code, spending years in murky legal territory before securing a perpetual license once MicroProse came back.
BMS 4.38 arrived in July 2025 with a new terrain engine and rebuilt F-16C and F-15C cockpits, and a hotfix followed that December. It still checks for a legitimate Falcon 4.0 install every time it launches.
I haven't flown BMS yet. With MicroProse officially backing the project, it's firmly on my radar, and I'd like to think I can manage more than a landing this time.
Richard Burns Rally is still getting new stages
Warthog's Richard Burns Rally came out in 2004, carrying the name of the 2001 World Rally Champion. Burns died the following year, and the game's community has carried his name ever since.
Most players today run it through RallySimFans, a Hungarian community platform built around the NGP physics model. RSF opens up hundreds of stages and keeps every car available at once, retiring the original game's eight car slots for good.
Online rallies and hotlap leaderboards keep the competitive side busy.
The updates keep coming. Version 1.54.0 brought classic Sanremo and RAC stages along with a Rally Season mode set in 1994, and version 1.55.0 has followed since. That's a lot of new road for a game older than YouTube.
One studio closure orphaned two of Microsoft's sims
Microsoft's January 2009 layoffs closed ACES Game Studio, the team behind its Flight Simulator line. Microsoft Train Simulator 2 died with it, and two older Microsoft sims lost whatever official home they had left.
My first PC game was Microsoft Train Simulator, its disc and manual given to me in 2005 when I was three. The disc no longer works.
Open Rails, a free and open-source successor started in 2009, still runs MSTS content, and I've put a couple of hours into the classic Marias Pass route on it.
Combat Flight Simulator 3 came later, when I was an FSX player curious about the fuss. I played it with the Firepower add-on from A2A and had a great time.
Microsoft stopped patching CFS3 around 2003. With no source code to work from, volunteers built on top of it, adding entire theaters through Mediterranean Air War in 2007 and the European Theater of Operations expansion in 2008.
A new Pacific theater covering the Battle of Leyte Gulf arrived as recently as October 2025.
IL-2 1946's best modpack runs on an older version of the game
IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 has a healthy number of hours in my Steam library, nearly all of them in the BAT modpack. My usual session is a quick custom sortie in a Bf 110 or a P-38, shooting down bombers.
Team Daidalos, a volunteer group working in cooperation with the original developer Maddox Games, carried the official game to patch 4.15.1 in December 2022.
BAT, built by the SAS community, stayed put. It requires version 4.12.2, and Steam offers a beta branch so players can roll back to it.
BAT 4.3 landed in December 2024, advertising 551 maps and thousands of aircraft slots. Two volunteer communities now maintain two different versions of the same game.
Silent Hunter III is still getting major updates in 2026
Silent Hunter III is the one game here I've never played. Ubisoft's 2005 U-boat sim is still on Steam, and for years its community has treated Grey Wolves Expansion, or GWX, as the definitive way to play.
Its official successor, GWX Knight's Cross, launched in February 2025.
The team hasn't slowed down. Version 2.0 added SH3 Commander support that September, and version 2.5 arrived in March 2026 with a new environment and updated manuals.
One team member said five or six of them worked several days a week for over two years to build it. Subsim, the long-running submarine sim forum, remains the project's home base.
The disc gave out before the community did
My MSTS disc doesn't spin up anymore, but I still have the sleeve and the manual. Even after years as a Trainz player, they're items I cherish.
Open Rails runs the route that came on that disc, and the people who built it have never asked me for a cent. Every game here depends on people like that, and none of them owe us anything.
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