An exclusive interview with John Venema
John Venema’s passion for flight simulation started in the early 1980s. Flying on Apple’s Flight Simulator II, he spent countless hours flying around in the 12 square mile area with mountains made of triangles. Reminiscing, he said: “I was enthralled, it was fantastic.”
He continued saying that he “never really collected scenery until Flight Simulator 2002 came around in late 2001”, and following that, he browsed various forums and started downloading freeware scenery.
‘Vista Australis’ (VOZ)
The transition from enjoying other people’s creations to crafting his own came when FS9 was released: “I created some textures because I was doing my PPL at the time.
Microsoft’s rendition of Australia was pretty bad, everything looked like the Sahara, so I just went into Photoshop and created textures and then shared them on a blog I created.”
It quickly became clear that there was a market for this kind of work: “Before I knew it, 10,000 people had signed up and were anxiously waiting for me to release it. I’d decided it would be a community project called ‘Vista Australis’ (VOZ).”
Describing the reaction he received when he released VOZ, John said: “It just went crazy. It wa…
