Japanese Go Kart company that copied Mario Kart must pay Nintendo close to $500,000

Nintendo was so upset that Maricar, now Street Kart, appealed the initial court ruling they increased their damages 5x.

If there’s one thing you learn from Maricar’s mistake is that you probably shouldn’t infringe on the intellectual property of a multi-billion dollar video game empire. According to Yahoo News Japan earlier today (Jan. 29,2020) Street Kart, more popularly once known as Maricar, must pay Nintendo 50 million yen or $458,393.90 to be exact.

The kicker is that if Maricar did the right thing and paid Nintendo’s initial demands, they would’ve only been fined 10 million yen or less than $10,000.

If you’re fans of our blog, you’ll now that we’ve covered Maricar’s story before but this looks to be the exciting, albeit long and drawn out conclusion.

Maricar’s troubles first started around Feb. 2017 when they were called out by Nintendo for lending out Nintendo characters costumes like Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach, to customers. Pair that with their red karts and their name, Maricar, and it was obvious who they were trying to copy.

This Getty image below is from May 2018. Clearly, Maricar did not take Nintendo seriously and kept lending out costumes, business as usual.

In Sept. 2018, Tokyo District court acknowledge Nintendo’s claim of unfair competition and formerly ordered Maricar to cease using the name Maricar, to stop giving out Mario Kart costumes, and to pay just a little under $10,000 in fines.

Maricar was like, “No we will not and we’ll appeal this decision instead.”

Big mistake.

Nintendo increased their fines demanded to 50 million yen. In May 2019 the Intellectual Property High Court reaffirmed the initial court’s decision and considered how much damages should be awarded to Nintendo which leads us to where we are today.

Now, if you visit Maricar.JP, you’re redirect to Kart. ST. As mentioned, Maricar is now officially Street Kart.

If you visit their Instagram and look at their tagged photos, it looks like they no longer offer Nintendo costumes. Disney costumes, however, are fair play I guess. They sure like to play with fire.

View this post on Instagram

Karting in the streets of Tokyo. Driving through the Shibuya crossing and waving to everyone was too much fun. #tokyo #shibuya #shibuyacrossing #japan #karting #spiderman

A post shared by Yamuda (@yamuda9) on Jan 20, 2020 at 12:46am PST

View this post on Instagram

There are sooo many reason why I love Japan and this is just one of them ???. Where else can you ride a go kart through busy city streets dressed in Rilakkuma and eat some of the best otoro don's all on the same day? ?? ______ If you ever plan to go on one of these go kart tours ? (which you absolutely should), always wear a face mask! You'll be driving alongside cars and buses and you don’t want soot getting on your face or into your lungs ?

A post shared by J E S S I C A ? (@mmhm.honey) on Jan 6, 2020 at 5:39pm PST

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Undoubtedly one of the highlights of this trip – MARIfriggenCART ? Now excuse me while I go train to be a racecar driver!

A post shared by Rebecca Forsythe (@becbreezy_) on Dec 5, 2019 at 4:11pm PST

The whole karting experience costs $90 per person so Maricar…I mean Street Kart..will have to rent out over 5,000 individual Kart rides until they recoup their costs, that is, if they don’t go out of business first.

Ya, don’t mess with Nintendo.