A variety of pirated games were found in the browser add-ons of Microsoft Edge. A lot of the games were from Nintendo—including Mario Kart 64 and Super Mario Bros. Games like Minecraft and Pac-Man were found in the add-ons as well.
Microsoft Edge’s add-ons are similar to Google Chrome’s extensions—where you can find useful things like spellcheckers and other productivity software. Users are also able to customise add-ons, and it seemed like some users took advantage of it by hiding these pirated copies of games within the browser extensions.
The games—which you could download for free—included classic Nintendo games like Mario Kart 64 and Super Mario Bros. Non-Nintendo games included Sonic 2, Pac-Man, and Tetris.
Most of the games have now been removed from the Edge store, but they were apparently available for some time. According to PCMag, some games were uploaded as early as October 2020.
Microsoft Edge Dev’s Twitter account even posted a link promoting the illegal games when they were still available. The tweet read, “Did you know Microsoft Edge has these plus more vintage games on the extensions site?” However, the tweet which included the link to the titles has since been deleted.
Extensions have often been used to sneak software into web browsers that could potentially be harmful. While these illegal game add-ons have been deleted (as far as we know), downloadable extensions that don’t have an official source should be avoided if you don’t want your computer accidentally download malicious software.
