Nintendo is bringing Mario Kart to smartphones

Nintendo has announced the latest of its IPs to make the leap to smartphones, and it’s a big one: Mario Kart. An app called Mario Kart Tour is set to be released in the next financial year, meaning anywhere between April 2018 and March 2019.

No details about Mario Kart Tour have been made available other than its existence, but the Mario Kart franchise is one of Nintendo’s biggest. Yesterday the company announced that 14.86 million Switch consoles have been sold, along with about half as many copies of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe — a straight port of a game that managed to sell a further eight million copies even on the Wii U.

Nintendo is likely to have more mobile titles in the works. The company originally planned to have released five smartphone games by 2017, but only Super Mario Run, Fire Emblem Heroes, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and the ill-fated Miitomo social app have made it out so far. Last year The Wall Street Journal reported that Nintendo was working on a Legend of Zelda mobile title.