Mario Kart Tour Takes Its Final Lap: Nintendo’s Mobile Racer Shuts Down Tonight

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The checkered flag is out for Mario Kart Tour. Tonight at 11 p.m. Pacific, Nintendo pulls the plug on its mobile Mario Kart spinoff, ending a seven-year run that started with one of the biggest launches in smartphone history. Once the servers go dark, the app will stop working entirely — there is no offline mode coming to save it.

Launched in September 2019, Mario Kart Tour got off to a bumpy start. Its gacha-style unlocks and a $5-a-month Gold Pass drew plenty of side-eye from a fanbase that was used to paying once for a kart racer. But the game found its footing and its audience: it racked up tens of millions of downloads in its first week and, according to AppMagic estimates, has since been downloaded over 274 million times while generating roughly $268 million for Nintendo.

Over the years, Tour became something stranger and more interesting than a shrunken-down Mario Kart. Its biweekly “tours” rotated through real-world-themed tracks — New York Minute, Tokyo Blur, Sydney Sprint — and drip-fed an enormous wardrobe of driver variants, karts, and gliders. Active development of new content quietly stopped back in 2023, when Nintendo shifted the game into rerun mode, recycling old tours instead of making new ones.

The final wind-down has been methodical. Nintendo halted ruby sales in July and stopped new Gold Pass subscriptions, making the pass’s perks free for everyone during the game’s last months. A final Anniversary Tour has been running as a greatest-hits sendoff, and Nintendo shared parting stats with players — most fittingly, Bowser turned out to be the most-used driver of all time, trailed by Princess Peach and Toad.

What happens at midnight is what stings: unlike Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, which got a paid offline successor when its service ended, Mario Kart Tour has no such afterlife. Friend lists, leaderboards, daily rewards, multiplayer — all of it evaporates with the servers. Any unspent rubies go with them, so if you have any left, spend them now on a last pipe pull or a Coin Rush run.

The closure is the latest sign that Nintendo’s mobile ambitions have cooled considerably. Since entering the smartphone business with Super Mario Run in 2016, the company has steadily wound down its mobile catalog, and Tour’s shutdown leaves its phone presence thinner than ever.

If you ever touched Mario Kart Tour — even for a week in 2019 — tonight is your last chance to take it for one final drive. Screenshot your favorite combos, run a last race, and give the servers a proper farewell. Once 11 p.m. PT hits, it’s game over for real.

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