Nintendo has attempted to break into the mobile market a few times with varying levels of success. It’s probably fair to say Mario Kart Tour hasn’t been a runaway success, but it hasn’t been a complete failure either. Yes, it’s about to shut down, but it ran for eight years before the wolves arrived at its door.
Mario Kart Tour Shuts Down Today
Nintendo announced earlier this year that it would be ending service for Mario Kart Tour on September 29, 2026. For those of you who don’t have a calendar handy, that day is today. That means, after today, Tour won’t only be unavailable to download, but even if you already have it installed on your phone, it will be completely unplayable.
The exact time service for Mario Kart Tour will end is 11 pm PDT. That technically means you’ll be able to keep playing it into the early hours of September 30, depending on where you are in the world. The game will still be playable until 2 am EST, and if you want to pull an all-nighter in the UK to say goodbye, you’ll have until 7 am tomorrow to keep playing.
There Are Still No Plans For An Offline Version
Those who still play Tour wondered if Nintendo would leave an offline version playable after the game is shut down. The answer to that query was no when the closure was announced, and that answer remains unchanged with only hours to go until the game disappears for good.
Mario Kart Tour is free-to-play. Nintendo made money from it by selling an in-game currency called rubies. If you have any spare rubies rattling around in your Tour wallet, I’d spend them now before it’s too late. You won’t be able to make the most of whatever you spend them on for very long, but the alternative is the currency you paid for disappearing with the game later today.
Even though it’s a Mario Kart game, an installment in one of the most successful video game series of all time, Tour never really seemed like a title designed to appeal to hardcore Mario Kart fans. It felt like more of a way to get people who don’t own a Switch to play a Mario Kart game. That’s likely why there hasn’t been much backlash over the decision to shut it down.
More Needs To Be Done To Preserve Delisted Mobile Games
This is also much more commonplace for mobile games than it is for titles on console and PC. Most mobile games are free and played by the most casual audiences imaginable. When one gets shut down, people either don’t care because they didn’t pay for it, or don’t even notice because they barely played it anyway, or downloaded it, played it for a few hours, and then forgot it exists.
Mobile games are very much a part of the game preservation problem. Arguably the biggest part, and certainly the most overlooked. There are countless mobile games that are now lost to time because they were delisted with no thought given to how they might be preserved. Mario Kart Tour is about to become one of those games. A game that was flaunted as a mainline entry in the Mario Kart series when it launched. Enjoy it for a few more hours before the Mario Kart series forever has a gap that will likely never be plugged.