If by emulation you mean your ability to emulate, absolutely not. Its a portable program, you can find countless mirrors of the downloads or ask someone you know and trust for a copy. If you mean active development in 3DS emulation… Yeah probably dead.

I have no clue about the old launcher, but the current launcher allows you to select any version all the way back past alpha. It was a lot of fun to try to hunt down which version I probably first played.

Honestly this is a pretty big deal. Mario Kart 8 has been an absolute sales juggernaut. It’s been largely speculated that mario kart 9 has been delayed just because 8 keeps on making millions. It’s just so uncommon to see a game sell in such huge numbers for over 6 years like that, especially because the game itself is way older than that and it didn’t even get any expansions/dlc until very recently.

In the context of remasters, the same thing happened with Dark Souls 1 and its remaster.