THE MARIO KART LAWSUIT
Why You Can't Dress as Mario: The MariCar Lawsuit
The operator used to be called MariCar and dressed drivers as Mario and Luigi. Nintendo sued, won at every level, and the industry's costumes changed for good.
See Tokyo go-kart dates on GetYourGuide ↗It started as MariCar — deliberately close to the name
The original operator traded under the name MariCar, run by a company called Mari Mobility Development Inc., and marketed itself explicitly as a real-life version of Nintendo's Mario Kart franchise, right down to renting out Mario, Luigi and other character costumes for drivers to wear while driving through Tokyo traffic. The pitch worked spectacularly well commercially — it became one of the most talked-about and photographed tourist experiences in the city, an appeal driven in large part by exactly the video-game association its own name and its costume rack were designed to invite in visitors' minds.
Nintendo's 2017 lawsuit
Nintendo filed suit in 2017 under Japan's Unfair Competition Prevention Act, arguing that renting out its characters' costumes and trading under a name consumers would naturally read as a stand-in for 'Mario Kart' created a false impression that the tours were officially affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo, when they were not. Nintendo sought both an injunction to stop the practice outright and 50 million yen in damages; reporting at the time also noted the company's stated concern that any road accident involving a costumed 'Mario' would reflect on its brand regardless of who was actually at fault, a reputational risk on top of the trademark issue.
The 2018 district court ruling
In September 2018 the Tokyo District Court sided with Nintendo, ordering the operator to stop renting out the Nintendo-character costumes entirely and to pay damages of just over 10.2 million yen — a little more than a fifth of the full amount Nintendo had originally sought at first instance. Rather than complying in full and closing the matter there, the company appealed the ruling, and continued operating tours under the MariCar name while the appeal was heard, betting that a higher court would take a different view of the case.
The appeal raises damages to the full ¥50 million
It didn't. In January 2020, Japan's Intellectual Property High Court heard the appeal and ruled more decisively against the operator than the district court had, raising the damages award all the way to the full 50 million yen Nintendo had originally claimed and additionally ordering the company to stop using the MariCar name itself, not merely the character costumes it had already been told to drop. That combination — the higher figure plus the loss of the name it had built its entire brand around — was a heavier blow than the first ruling. The operator pushed the fight one level further still, seeking a final appeal to Japan's Supreme Court rather than accepting the High Court's decision as the end of the matter.
The Supreme Court closes the case, December 2020
On 25 December 2020, the Supreme Court of Japan dismissed the operator's final appeal outright, making the 50-million-yen damages ruling and the injunction against the MariCar name legally final after roughly three years of continuous litigation across three levels of Japan's court system. By that point the company had already rebranded its operations as Street Kart, dropping both the MariCar name and every remaining Nintendo-linked costume ahead of the final ruling rather than waiting to be forced into it — the same rebrand that essentially every operator in this space now runs under in some form, whether or not they were ever individually named in Nintendo's original suit.
What it actually means for you today
The karts themselves, the routes, and the guide-led convoy format are all unchanged by any of this — what disappeared was specifically the video-game branding wrapped around them. Every operator's costume rack today runs to generic superhero and film-style outfits rather than anything traceable back to Mario Kart, and none of them market themselves as an official or Nintendo-licensed experience, because that exact association is what the courts spent three years ruling against. If a listing's marketing copy still leans on 'real-life Mario Kart' language to sell the vibe, treat it as loose shorthand for the concept rather than a literal claim about what's waiting in the costume box.