Mario Kart Tour is gone. Nintendo’s free-to-play mobile racer went offline permanently at 11:00 p.m. Pacific on September 29 — and because the game was always-online, it is now unplayable in any capacity, taking seven years of tracks, characters and skins down with it.
From Phenomenon to Footnote
Launched in 2019 during the drought after Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Tour started barebones — limited controls, and at first it didn’t even support landscape play. Interest was enormous anyway: the game amassed well over 100 million downloads in its first month. Over the years Nintendo improved it dramatically, adding new tracks, characters, skins and variants while dropping some of its more predatory practices — to the point where, as KitGuru puts it, Tour became “the single-most content rich entry in the whole franchise.”
Some of that work survives elsewhere: a number of original Tour tracks were later added to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe via its Booster Course Pass. But everything that stayed exclusive to the mobile game — its original courses, its character variants, its seasonal events — is now lost forever.
No Offline Reprieve
Nintendo confirmed the end back in July, announcing that “service for the Mario Kart Tour game for smart devices will come to an end as of 11:00 p.m. Pacific on September 29.” Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp players got an offline version when that game’s service ended, but Nintendo has confirmed nothing of the sort is “scheduled for release” for Tour — so a preserved, playable archive of the game does not appear to be coming.
The Money It Made
Tour’s business case is closed now, and it’s not nothing: Mobilegamer.biz and VGC both put the game’s lifetime revenue at nearly $270 million across its seven-year run — a healthy figure for a game Nintendo ultimately treated as an experiment.
The shutdown closes the book on Nintendo’s mobile Mario Kart experiment while the company’s attention remains firmly on the Switch 2 era of its business.