Nintendos is rumored to be developing a Mario Kart Tour PC port since Mario Kart Tours is mobile-only and free-to-play. Mario Kart Tour is one of a number of Nintendo mobile games that are available on smart devices, joining several other franchise spin-off titles such as Fire Emblem, Animal Crossing, and others.
As reported by user MondoMega on ResetEra, the latest data-mined update for mobile Mario Kart Tour offers a glimpse at Nintendo’s plans for the future of the title. According to the data-mined information of the latest update for the free-to-play mobile Mario Kart Tour racer, Nintendo has added not just mouse support, but also a variety of code references to local emulation, suggesting a PC port may be on the way.
There are plenty of emulators out there which enable you to play Nintendo titles on a PC platform, but it seems Nintendo might finally give fans an official port of one of their titles. The title in question is Mario Kart Tour, which was released as a mobile title back in 2019.
Using emulators to play Nintendo games on PC is pretty commonplace for a lot of Nintendo titles, and new emulation support may suggest that Mario Kart Tour could be making its way onto Google Play Games for PC, a forthcoming app that will let players play games that are typically limited to mobile devices in the Google Play Store on PC.
Follow up/Datamining: They have added the mouse as a new input mode. Please note that this is speculation and may never be available to the public. Maybe it's only for the developers to use. #MarioKartTour
Thanks to, @koopavocelot https://t.co/Kr3F6PAus9 pic.twitter.com/Fz31rX9R6H
— Mario Kart (Tour) News (@kart_tour) July 4, 2022
Google has previously announced that Google Play Games will come to PCs this year using high-performance emulation, and Nintendo may be readying Nintendo apps for the upcoming service. Native emulation support is vague from a coding perspective, but this comes right around the time that Google is set to roll out its Google Play Games for PC service, which allows you to play Android games on PC, and is already in beta.
Currently, in beta, the Microsofts Windows app for Google Play Games allows Android users to emulate their games on a PC platform, meaning one of its titles may get emulated through Google Play Games instead of having an entire PC port. Nintendos mobile titles, such as one of its own, have proven successful without being ported to other platforms, so perhaps Nintendo does not feel compelled to port the Mario Kart spinoff to the PC platform yet.
Nintendos other mobile games, such as Fire Emblem Heroes, Dragalia Lost, and Super Mario Run, also appear like good candidates to eventually be released on PC, but we will have to wait and see if it comes to pass. Exactly how the experience of Mario Kart Tour built so heavily on the game vertical-screen play experience will transfer over to the display screen and mouse is another matter, but seeing official Nintendo software released on PCs in the 21st century would be the most remarkable thing.