Mario Kart Could Have Been Playable Inside Teslas

Have you ever found yourself driving down the road and feeling like you were in a real-life version of Mario Kart? Well, it's not as far fetched as you might imagine because it turns out that, if things had gone differently, you could have been able to play Mario Kart inside a Tesla.

In a snappy little response from Elon Musk's official Twitter account, he responded to another Twitter user asking about including a digital version of Mario Kart inside of a Tesla while the car is being charged.

Unfortunately for gamers, there will be no Mario Kart racing against other Tesla owners while you charge your Tesla. I'm not entirely sure how true it is that Nintendo denied them a license to include Mario Kart in Teslas, but I imagine that it may have something to do with the fact that Nintendo didn't want to get involved with including its software in a vehicle as a built-in feature that may or may not be blamed every time a Tesla crashes, no matter how rare that occurrence may be.

Could you imagine Shigeru Miyamoto in court trying to defend Luigi's death stare after it's labeled as the potential cause of a hazardous crash involving a Tesla? It wouldn't be a good look for Nintendo at all.

And besides, Mario Kart 8: Deluxe is still one of the best selling games of the eighth generation of home console gaming, along with Super Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch. So it's not like Nintendo is hurting so bad for publicity that it would need to license out the game to be included in Tesla models. Now had Musk tried to get the game installed in the electric cars back when Nintendo was struggling with the Wii U, he might have received a completely different answer.

However, given that Nintendo is doing super well right now, especially coming off a blockbuster Black Friday where the Switch was the best-selling console over the five day period between the Thursday before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it's unlikely that the company is looking to put themselves in any sort of position that might jeopardize all the good things going for it at the moment. And that's not to mention that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is due out for release in December, so it's all uphill from here.

If you combine this with the fact that Nintendo is also extremely protective of its brand IPs, even going as far as to have a go-kart company in Japan to stop allowing customers to cosplay as the characters from Mario Kart, it's not much of a surprise that Musk would be denied the ability to use the game in his cars.

What's interesting, though, is that some other gamers suggested that maybe Musk could get Steam built into the Tesla, and he responded saying that it would be cool. So where one door closes another might open? How cool would it be to access your Steam library and play games directly from within your Tesla? Of course, it still doesn't get around the problem of distracting drivers, which is probably the one issue that Nintendo had with having Mario Kart featured in the popular electric cars.