A number of older games, including many from Nintendo, were seemingly illegally published on the Microsoft Edge store, allowing users to play the titles in the browser. Like its competitors, Edge has a wide variety of add-ons and extensions available to users, giving them the ability to customize and improve the experiencing of using the software. The successor to Internet Explorer, the program also features ads built-in that cannot be easily blocked.
While pirating games or publishing ROMs of classic titles is something that is frowned upon by practically everyone in the industry, Nintendo often takes a particularly dim view of the practice. The Japanese company has historically forced sites hosting ROMs of its games to remove them and has sued many individuals and groups to protect its intellectual property. Last year, Nintendo took legal action against hackers who were selling software that would allow players to run pirated content on Switch consoles. A court later awarded Nintendo $2 million in damages.
Microsoft Edge was seemingly hosting many illegal copies of classic Nintendo games, with the software hidden within extensions for the internet browser. According to The Verge, the Edge extension store had what appeared to be pirated copies of games such as Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart 64, and Tetris. Some of the extensions also contained other hit games such as Pac-Man and Minecraft. While most of these titles have now been removed from the Edge store, an official Microsoft account had appeared to promote the extensions in a now-deleted post that can be seen below. Most of the downloads seemingly included ROMs of the original titles and some have been available since at least October 2020. It also isn't clear exactly who had published the extensions or how many other potential games are still available.
Those wanting to get a taste of classic Nintendo games can legally play many of the titles on the Switch. Nintendo offers a special emulator as part of the Switch Online subscription, which gives players the opportunity to play an expanding catalog of NES and SNES games directly on the console. Earlier this week, Nintendo announced that four new games were being added to the service in the form of Doomsday Warrior. Psycho Dream, Fire 'N Ice, and Prehistorik Man.
Extensions have often been used by nefarious groups to sneak software into web browsers that generally should not be there. This is because these stores are usually not as closely monitored as other marketplaces. Typically these illicit expansions are forbidden by the official service provider; it's very surprising to see Microsoft apparently openly endorsing these shady emulations of classic Nintendo titles.
Source: The Verge