On January 3, 2020, NieR: Automata’s director, Yoko Taro, quote retweeted a Twitter user who reportedly discovered a NieR: Automata cheat code. Yoko Taro’s addition to the retweet mentions “three years ten months,” a reference to the time that has passed since the game released in Japan on February 23, 2017 and in North America on March 7, 2017.
NieR: Automata features a variety of endings and the cheat allows the player to unlock bonus modes and skip to the last ending immediately after defeating the game’s first boss. While this bears some semblance to glitches commonly employed by speed-runners, an in-game message that directly addresses the player indicates that it’s a cheat code in the classical sense, albeit one that seems difficult to find. Lance McDonald, the person who found it, mentioned that its discovery was the result of “hundreds of hours of reverse engineering.” McDonald went on to say that he’ll work on a full video regarding the cheat in the near future.
NieR Automata is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. According to the game’s official Twitter account, it has sold over five million copies worldwide between physical and digital copies. NieR Replicant ver. 1.22474487139…, an updated version of the prequel, Nier Replicant, is expected to release on April 23, 2021 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam.
