Mario Kart, the popular racing game series from Nintendo, has finally made it to mobile phones. The mobile game, titled Mario Kart Tour, released on Sept. 25 and accumulated 90 million downloads within its first week, according to CNN.
The game itself is comprised of different cups, each of which have three different races and a bonus challenge. The cups have different levels with each getting harder than the last. These cups fall under a tour.
These tours are special events that occur for a set period of time. The current tour is the New York Tour, which has special prized characters and karts based on elements of the last major Mario game, Super Mario Odyssey, a Nintendo Switch title which was released in October 2017. Before each race, the player chooses a racer, kart and glider. Each has special bonuses depending on the track for the race.
The release of the game falls in line with the recent trend of Nintendo releasing their most popular titles on mobile, such as Super Mario Run, Pokémon Go and Pokémon Masters. Each of these titles gained attention and have helped Nintendo become aware of the mobile market.
Each of these games, including the already popular Mario Kart Tour, has been released for free. This is not uncommon for app games, with their revenue stemming from ads. However, Mario Kart Tour is ad-free. Instead, there is a gold pass available in the game for $5 a month that gives players extra bonuses as they play, including more coins and gems, the game’s currencies.
The Mario Kart series’ most popular feature is the ability to be played with friends. But, currently, there is no multiplayer mode available in Mario Kart Tour. There is an option for it in the main menu of the game. However, it is currently grayed out and labelled “Inbound,” hinting that it is a planned future update for the game. Nothing more has been said officially regarding what exactly this supposed multiplayer mode will be like.
Despite the lack of this key feature of Mario Kart games, the app is still popular around the world, including on Winthrop’s campus.
“The app runs smoothly and it hooks me back in each time. It’s a good way to kill time and a good conversation topic with people,” Kyra Sikorski, a freshman french education major, said.
Sikorski also said, in relation to the console version of the game series, that Mario Kart Tour “is a way to play it if you don’t have a console,” but she feels that it falls short in characters. “They have a way to unlock new characters but you have to spend money, unlike the console. Most of the characters are there already.”
When asked about the downsides of the game, “the maps start to repeat [themselves],” she said.
Matthew Howard, a junior choral music major, is a member of the competitive gaming club and thinks the app is “pretty cool.”
“They translated it pretty well to phone. It is pretty faithful, honestly,” Howard said.
He acknowledges that there are limitations with the phone version, but for a free version of Mario Kart he believed there are not any real downsides, “It is still a lot of fun. I’m willing to overlook a couple of things.”
“It is a smart decision to release it free first. People love Mario Kart and they want to play Mario Kart. Let it advertise itself,” Howard said.
While the app has already built up a playerbase, Nintendo has kept their lips sealed about future plans for the game. There have been rumors heard by players, including Howard, going around that Nintendo will be adding a $10 charge in order to play multiplayer when it finally releases. However, these rumors only stem from an alleged post by the official Mario Kart Tour account on Twitter that, if it did exist, cannot be found on their feed now.
Only time can tell if Mario Kart Tour will continue its rise to greatness, or if it will spin out.
Photo: Sam Ross/ The Johnsonian
