Windows 11’s install process gets more fun with new minigame

Image: Microsoft

Setting up a new Windows laptop, or installing a fresh copy of Windows on a machine, is kind of a slog. While it doesn’t take multiple hours like it used to (thanks, SSDs!), it’s still a lot of time pressing one or two buttons, then watching a loading screen and waiting for the next button to appear. Microsoft might be alleviating some of the boredom by taking that game you were playing off your phone and just slapping it in the setup process.

The game in question is Edge://surf, Microsoft Edge’s answer to Chrome’s offline T-Rex runner game for the browser. As The Verge notes, this top-down, pixelated surfing game plays more or less the same as SkiFree, a freeware game added to Windows 3.0 waaaaay back in 1991, and duplicated and emulated on various platforms ever since. The surfing game is a bit more polished and colorful, but it has the same essential steer-ing-only setup.

The game is appearing in the setup process for the latest Microsoft-branded hardware, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and Surface Laptop Go 3. It may or may not appear for the rest of the Windows world during Windows 11 installations as the new version propagates to both PC manufacturers and users. But if you’re desperate to play it while Windows boots for the first time, you can head to edge://surf in Edge — it even works on the phone version of the browser.

Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer

Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.

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