One of Kerbal Space Program’s biggest inspirations was a promotional Flash game for Top Gear: ‘That was the most similar game to KSP that I could find back then’
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Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?”
Felipe Falanghe got into PC gaming by playing Flight Simulator 4 on his dad’s laptop. “I remember having no idea what I was doing,” Falanghe says. “Me and my brother, we were just figuring it out and playing it on the keyboard and trying to make it go.”
It was through games like Flight Simulator, as well as The Sims, that Falanghe got into modding, which started him on his journey to game developer. That happened in 2010, while Falanghe was working at the marketing firm Squad, a job he disliked and decided to leave during an intense array of projects: “They said ‘If you help us these next couple of months, we’ll let you make your game here,'” he recalls. “I was like ‘That’s not true. That doesn’t happen to people … but what do I have to lose?'”
The result of this fateful decision was Kerbal Space Program, a unique rocket science simulator that is one of PC Gamer’s highest-rated games. “I was always working with this idea that for all I know next week this is over, so let’s do anything I can under that assumption,” he says. “It would be unthinkable to pitch the entire thing that KSP became to a normal game studio.”
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Falanghe now runs his own development company—Floating Origin Interactive—where he’s working on several projects. But he took a break from those to show me around the digital launchpad of his Steam library. We discussed new remakes, old MMOs, and the triumphant return of a PC gaming legend.
What game are you currently playing?
That would be Oblivion, the remastered version. It’s actually been really good. I don’t remember playing the original back in the day. I didn’t get very far into it. Something else probably grabbed my attention and pulled me away. But I remember feeling really stuck. I just wanted to steal everything I could see, and then I became a vampire by accident.
That was problematic. But on the new one, I don’t know. Maybe I’m more mature and can understand the story better. Or having played Skyrim and a bunch of Fallouts and Starfield and a bunch of other Bethesda games, going back to Oblivion now, I’m like “Oh yeah, this makes so much more sense now.” You can understand the patterns a little better.
I’m a stealth archer, of course. Objectively the only correct way to play. The way I play it is maybe less conventional. I have it installed on my main computer here, but I stream it to the Steam Deck and play it on the couch because it’s just so much more comfortable …. On the remastered version, I feel like I’ve finally got a good control setup that uses gamepad controls, so it’s like smooth movement and all.
What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?
There’s multiple games I could choose. I’m playing Oblivion, but then I revert to playing a first-person shooter like BattleBit. I’ve played an untold amount of hours already. It’s so fun. I don’t know what it is about the blockiness of it. It’s not like a PUBG or a Battlefield or something more gritty like that. It’s more light-hearted and it runs super well on Steam Deck. It’s fun, and the sound you get when you get a one-shot kill with a sniper rifle, it’s so deeply satisfying.
I was also playing Old School RuneScape. I did another nostalgia trip back to that. That was something I was playing back in 2005. I first discovered it on the browser, and I was like “Wow, this is surprisingly deep for a browser game.” It was actually what I was playing just before I discovered a career in game design was a possibility for me. The graphics are simple enough, I [felt] like this seems possible, like I could maybe produce something like this, not knowing anything about game design yet. These days I know the monumental amount of work that goes into RuneScape.
[When] I started working on KSP, it was super unambitious at first. My first pitch [to Squad] was that it was going to be a Flash game. In 2010, Flash was still a reasonable thing to suggest …. I pitched it because I thought this was the least insane idea. I was like “I feel like this one is safe enough. It sounds simple enough to do the rocket science simulator.” Little did everybody involved know what was coming.
But it was supposed to have been simple. I remember there was an old Flash game that was like an advert game for Top Gear. The Reliant Shuttle launch game, and you launched the Reliant Robin shuttle, and through the stages you had to manage different things. So when it was on the boosters, you had to manage the throttle so that they didn’t explode … that was the most similar game to KSP that I could find back then, and that was the scope initially.
What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?
It’s either going to be Full Throttle or Fragile Allegiance. I’m not sure which is the older one, but both of them are installed. Fragile Allegiance is this old strategy game where you run mining franchise colonies on asteroids. I don’t know what it is about it, it’s just so good. It’s a DOS game, and you play it now and it’s still just as good. You can lose hours in it, so I’ve always got it installed.
As for Full Throttle, I’ve got the remastered version installed now, so I don’t know if that counts as ‘oldest’ anymore. It can revert to the classic graphics and all. But I remember very well, my Full Throttle disc back in the day had scratches on it, so there were a few cutscenes that never actually played. So as I was playing the remastered version, I ran into a bit of cutscene that I had never watched, and I was like “Wow, that explains it so well!”
What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?
I just looked it up to be sure, but between Flight Sim 2020 and 2024, I’ve got going on 2,000 hours. The rest of my life playing Flight Sim not included. Those are unaccounted for.
I was so bummed when Microsoft ended the series after FSX. There was a period of 14 years where there was no Microsoft Flight Simulator. You had X-Plane, and you had Flight Gear and Prepar3D and all those, and X-Plane is a worthy competitor, but it never sparked joy in me the same way.
I’ve had every single one since FS4. I have the whole list. Every two years, a new one would come out, and pretty much that was when you needed to upgrade. Back then, that was how it worked. New Flight Sim comes out? OK, we need a new computer.
I think the most powerful moments were with the new Flight Sim in 2020 because it has satellite imagery of everything. So you can find your own home, find your childhood home and fly around it. It was a pretty powerful experience, especially flying around the areas in Brazil where I grew up, because I don’t live there anymore. So it was actually a powerful experience to do that and see it so well realised. It goes beyond seeing it in Google Earth or Street View.
What game will you never, ever uninstall?
Well, [there’s] Flight Sim. Fragile Allegiance is one I make a point of never uninstalling. I even managed to install it on my phone once. You have to set up a pretty convoluted stack of emulators to deal with that. But I had it running on my phone at one point, which was pretty cool.
Those two are definite ones that need to be installed. I’m not losing them.
What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?
There’s a bunch that I couldn’t live without. OBS is one. I’m using it right now. This is how I do stuff. I’ve worked remotely since the beginning of KSP and sharing the screen is just a fundamental part of it. I use OBS for everything. I have a Stream Deck with the controls for it. I can move stuff around, I can share the screen. I even have a plugin where I can use my phone as an external camera.
The other one is OneCommander, which is a file explorer. It’s just a really good file explorer. The one thing I always thought OSX does better than Windows is the multi-column view for browsing folders. You can see your entire folder tree, and you can go back four levels if you need to instead of going back one by one.
How tidy is your desktop screen?
I’ve definitely seen worse than mine. But I don’t use icons for applications. I like the old Windows 10 style of Start menu with the little icons right on the tray there. So I actually installed Start 11 to bring back the Windows 10-style menu. So most of my apps I access from those icons on the Start menu.
The other thing you can’t see is the screen of shame, where I have all these icons and stuff that I need to remember to do. And some of them have been here since, well, the Middle Ages, I guess. Some of them are embarrassingly old by now.
