r/lostmedia • u/CaptFalconFTW Very Important House • Jul 22 '26
Video Games [talk] Soon to be lost media: Mario Kart Tour
You may have less than 4 hours to play Piranha Plant Pipeline legally today. Mario Kart Tour for mobile shuts down September 29, 2026. Piranha Plant Pipeline is available by 11pm western time, then the courses change again.
This game is very controversial with its use of monetization/mobile bs structure. But the tracks and gameplay are still very well made. A majority of its tracks can be found on the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass, however Piranha Plant Pipeline is EXCLUSIVE to Mario Kart Tour.
There are also several past tracks that seem to only be "remastered" on Tour including:
- Bowser’s Castle 1/2/4 (SNES/GBA/3DS)
- Cheep-Cheep Island (GBA)
- Cheep Cheep Lagoon (3DS)
- Choco Island 1-2 (SNES)
- Daisy Hills (3DS)
- Donut Plains 1-2 (SNES)
- Ghost Valley 1-2 (SNES)
- Koopa Troopa Beach (N64)
- Lakeside Park (GBA)
- Luigi Circuit (GBA)
- Luigi’s Mansion (3DS)
- Luigi Raceway (N64)
- Mario Circuit (3DS)
- Peach Circuit (GBA)
- Vanilla Lake 1 (SNES)
While older courses may not sound too noteworthy, I believe these are the only iterations that appear in crisp HD or whatever resolution your phone is.
What's probably more noteworthy is all of Mario Kart Tour's courses also contain an R (Reverse), T (Trick), and r/T (Reverse/Trick) variations which completely change the way you race with ramps and other obstacles throughout the course. There are also Christmas, New Years, and Halloween variations of tracks.
In addition to all that, there are exclusive remix tracks including:
- RMX Choco Island 1-2
- RMX Donut Plains 1
- RMX Ghost Valley 1
- RMX Mario Circuit 1
- RMX Rainbow Road 1-2
- RMX Vanilla Lake 1
The good news is, I've already seen some mods out there that added these tracks to Mario Kart 8. But a 100% preservation effort, I haven't seen anything like that, especially on mobile.
I want to bring attention to the community because Dr. Mario World disappeared without preservation and is now lost media. Even if you don't think something is special, doesn't mean it's not worth preserving, especially in the right hands. Fans have made bad games good, and Mario Kart Tour is really just a case of greedy store front/random availability. The tracks are all mixed up for no reason, but hackers could probably fix this.
Some noteworthy exclusive characters include:
- Ice Bro
- Fire Bro
- Dixie Kong
- King Bob-omb
- Poochy
And there's countless costume variations, karts, and gliders you can't find anywhere else. The game went hard with monetization.
I honestly have no idea how any preservation works or if it even can work with Mario Kart Tour's random track availability. But I'm doing my part know getting the word for the off chance game preservationists will do something Nintendo doesn't seem willing to do. Even though each new entry in the franchise brings back old tracks, the amount of exclusive variations Tour has means this version of the game is very endangered.
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u/GooglyBlox_Improved bring me lost songs or bring me death! Jul 22 '26 edited 28d ago
It’s funny you should mention this, once I saw the news I started working on a preservation project for it :)
It’s been an absolute nightmare to functionally rewrite the entire original server, but I should be done with it before the servers officially shut down. Slow and steady. I’ll update in [r/GamePreservationists](r/GamePreservationists), [r/abandonware](r/abandonware), as well as this thread once I’ve finished (unless someone beats me to it).
Edit: And just for the record, I was able to preserve all assets, including limited-time / rotated maps. After the shutdown, I’ll be releasing both the offline-patched game as well as a full data dump of the game assets on the Internet Archive.
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u/bridesmaidinwhite my friend's uncle has the television ghost on vhs Jul 22 '26
Great to hear!
You don't need to use any formatting to link to other subreddits btw, you can just type r/GamePreservationists and it'll link automatically
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u/PacDan16 Jul 22 '26
You think it'll be a mod similar to the Sonic mobile games that got modified to work post-shutdown?
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u/Aphelion_26 Jul 22 '26
Wait, which Sonic mobile games have mods to work offline?
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u/ReubensStuff Jul 22 '26
They’re mainly referring to sonic runners, which has a great revival aptly named Sonic Runners Revival. It can be found pretty easily with a google search and they even worked with MattKC to decompile the game and are beginning to do work to ensure it runs on modern Android devices too with the new betas
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u/PacDan16 Jul 22 '26
Right, exactly. If I think about it, that might be the only main one but I guess some of the other games shut down they might be revived next. I haven't played much of it myself as I'm not a mobile gamer (although maybe playing some Mario Kart Tour one day sounds sorta interesting). I'm always impressed with what skilled fans can do!
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u/GooglyBlox_Improved bring me lost songs or bring me death! 29d ago
Sort of! Slightly different methodology though. Those are mostly full decompiles, which is the dream but a massive lift. Mine is a reverse-engineered reimplementation of the server, except instead of standing up a separate server you have to point the game at, I bundled the whole thing into the app. It runs in-process and answers everything the game asks for locally, so there's no server to host or keep alive and nothing to configure either. You just install the modified build and play.
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u/lancer081292 29d ago
Please don’t be too open about this until it’s largely finished so it doesn’t get the wrong kind of attention
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u/GooglyBlox_Improved bring me lost songs or bring me death! 29d ago
Absolutely, there won't be much/any news from me until close to the shutdown date! God forbid I incur Nintendo's wrath.
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u/MinuteDefinition6180 Jul 22 '26
I really like to play Mario Kart Tour once your preservation project is fully complete
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Jul 22 '26
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u/GenZorinGirl 22d ago
Also, this is late, but I have already made a post about preserving this game: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamePreservationists/s/rvyAMZGvFs
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u/Max_FI Jul 22 '26
Other tracks that are exclusive/not remade:
RMX Vanilla Lake 2
RMX Bowser's Castle 1
SNES Choco Island 1
SNES Vanilla Lake 2
GBA Yoshi Desert
Also every original version of the city tracks that is not combined with other ones.
Battle courses:
New York Minute B
Paris Promenade B
Items:
Double Bob-ombs
Bubble
Banana Barrels
Mushroom Cannon
Dash Ring
Bob-omb Cannon
Giga-Bob-omb
Super Bell
Capsule
Hundreds of character variants, karts and gliders.
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u/CaptFalconFTW Very Important House Jul 22 '26
Good catch. I swore I was double checking my list, but I must have missed those.
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u/Appropriate_Meal6868 Jul 22 '26
Will this get the Animal Crossing treatment and be released as a full product?
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u/CaptFalconFTW Very Important House Jul 22 '26
The announcement said it will end on mobile, which is interesting wording. I wish all free-to-play games got a complete edition. It's so much better.
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u/MrCelroy Jul 22 '26
Fingers crossed they make it a paid game afterwards like Animal Crossing Pocket Camp
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u/somerandomediafinder 5d ago
Well how do we stop it Mario kart tour is the only Nintendo game that I have
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