Bowser faces 10 years in jail, $4.5M in damages in Nintendo piracy case

Nintendo Switch running Bowser's Fury

Nintendo has won a major victory in a case against 52-year-old Canadian Gary Browser, a member of hacking group Team-Xecuter who was arrested in 2020. Bowser, better known as GaryOPA online, plead guilty to two counts: "conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices" alongside other members of Team-Xecuter, and "trafficking in circumvention devices," as laid out in a plea agreement filed on October 28 and obtained by Torrentfreak. He now faces a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison for each count.

Nintendo has become increasingly aggressive over the last several years in pursuing ROM websites and hardware hackers who make it possible to run pirated software on the Switch. Team-Xecuter was behind a custom firmware called SX OS, which it sold through a network of resellers—a controversial for-profit enterprise, considering most custom firmware development is free and open source.

Nintendo went after resellers first and has already won some cases, but the case against Team-Xecuter got the US Justice Department involved. Bowser, who bears no relation to improbably named Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser, was indicted alongside other Team-Xecuter members Max Louran, who was arrested in Canada and has yet to be extradited, and Yuanning Chen, who remains at large. Bowser was arrested in the Dominican Republic and extradited to the US to face 11 felony counts, including wire fraud and money laundering.

As laid out in the plea agreement, the government made the case that "while the enterprise attempted to cloak its illegal activity with a purported desire to support homebrew enthusiasts who wanted to design their own games, the predominant and primary design of the enterprise's products was teo allow purchasers to play pirated ROMs." The plea agreement states that Bowser ran the website maxconsole.com, which hosted information about Team-Xecuter's products, and that the team "created and supported ROM libraries of games that could be used by the enterprise's customers."

Some of the resellers also sold custom firmware bundled with packages of ROMs, which seems like a sure way to blow any deniability about customers purchasing your product for the sake of piracy. Likewise, Team-Xecuter required users to pay an additional license to play "backups" of their games, fuel for the government's claim that Team-Xecuter sold its devices first and foremost for the sake of piracy.

The US government claims Team-Xecuter earned "at least tens of millions of dollars" from selling SX OS devices, while Bowser himself estimated he earned $320,000 from running maxconsole.com and collecting advertising revenue. After pleading guilty, Bowser has been ordered to pay $4.5 million in restitution to Nintendo.

Bowser still faces sentencing that will determine his prison term, but that won't necessarily be the end of his legal troubles. He's facing another suit from Nintendo itself, filed earlier this year, for further damages—though unless he has an actual castle filled with gold coins, $4.5 million seems like it may already take a lifetime to pay off. 

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

Read more
A picture of Bowser behind jail bars.
Nintendo wins major French piracy case with EU-wide consequences: 'Significant not only for Nintendo, but for the entire games industry'
Mario 64 fire effect
52-year-old 'Super Mario' supermarket in Costa Rica wins unlikely victory against the Nintendo lawyers: 'He is Don Mario, he's my dad'
A computer screen with program code warning of a detected malware script program. 3d illustration
Coder faces 10 years' jailtime for creating a 'kill switch' that screwed-up his employers' systems when he was laid off
Palworld early access
Japanese patent attorney, burdened with a party pooper's knowledge, says Nintendo having 22 out of 23 Palworld-targeting claims 'rejected' in the US is business as usual
 In this photo illustration a novelty Bitcoin token is photographed on a US Dollar bank note, on January 4, 2025 in Bath, England. The Cryptocurrency market has recently received a significant boost by the election of Donald Trump with hopes of the start of a policy framework that could see Bitcoin as a strategic asset
Man charged with $65,000,000 worth of cryptocurrency heists was reportedly discovered through chatting on Discord with a company they allegedly stole from
talk to the joneses fortnite
Epic sues Fortnite cheater, donates his winnings to charity, forces him to publicly apologise, bans him for life, and all but sends him to his room without dinner
Latest in Hardware
Fallout New Vegas Key Art
The Fallout season 2 leaks continue with videos of the New Vegas set, including a sign for Mr. House's casino
The PCIe slot on an Asus ROG Strix B850-F Gaming WiFi motherboard, showing the Q-release latch for GPUs.
Gigabyte seemingly mocks Asus' recent Q-release debacle with a video swapping out an RTX 5070 Ti 100 times
Cyberpunk upscaling
New modder tool makes it easier than ever to swap AMD's FSR 4 scaling for Nvidia's DLSS or Intel's XeSS and vice versa
SteelSeries QcK Performance mouse pads overlapping on a desk
The SteelSeries QcK Performance series has reignited my excitement over the simple pleasure of a quality mouse pad… and trying to click skulls with pinpoint accuracy
NZXT H7 Flow PC case being built into
NZXT H7 Flow review (2024 Edition)
Xbox handheld
Microsoft is reportedly prepping a handheld Xbox for later this year with new consoles coming in 2027
Latest in News
A young witch watering a smiling mushroom in a magic garden
Here's a roguelite dungeon crawler Steam reviewers call 'a botanical Diablo' and 'like Cult of the Lamb' except you manage a mystical garden
Destiny 2 Rite of the Nine: The Emissary, massive, ominously standing at the edge of a water basin.
Oops! Bungie rolled out Destiny 2's Rite of the Nine event three weeks early, and new loot is already dropping
No Rest for the Wicked Steam early access screenshots
No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios is now 'fully independent' after acquiring the rights to the game from Take-Two
A hunter posing with an absurd Blangonga outfit in Monster Hunter Wilds.
Attention, fashion hunters: There's a Monster Hunter Wilds mod to disable all those obnoxious glowing buff effects that distract from your fits
Fallout New Vegas Key Art
The Fallout season 2 leaks continue with videos of the New Vegas set, including a sign for Mr. House's casino
Gallywix wears an uneasy smile as he's confronted by Xal'atath in WoW: The War Within.
World of Warcraft guild uses exploits to get world 'first' on the game's new raid, gets banned, puts its name backwards and does it again