After a long week of cryptic videos and mysteries, it’s been revealed that user Sadfutago and their secret door in Nier Automata was, in fact, just a mod.

After teasing all day a link, over 12,000 people tuned into the stream to see what people had been hoping was viral marketing for a new project from Yoko Taro, be it in the form of a new Drakengard or Nier game.

“We have been loving all the discussions and theories- it has been an amazing journey”, they said in a statement at the end of the video. “It has been inspiring to see the community come together after so many years, it has made the work well worth it”.

However, the end of the video instead revealed what many will now claim to have suspected the whole time: the secret door in NieR Automata was just a fan project.

The team apologized for all the hype that had been born from their tease, saying they never expected fans of the esoteric RPG series to blow it up as much as they did.

“We were aiming for cut content/secret, not ARG, and only wanted it to last 2-3 days”, they said.

This started with reddit user sadfutago, who’d posted a clip about a seemingly unfound door in the Copied City level of NieR Automata.

As the days went on, sadfutago would go deeper into the area, discovering references to NieR: Replicant as well as the Drakengard series.

Fans, meanwhile, had also started to speculate on the details of the reveal, either trying to debunk it or prove what it could be alluding to with passages from books and stage plays.

If nothing else, credit needs to be given to the modding team- their presentation was so thoroughly weird that many, including members of this editorial team, believed that it could be none other than Yoko Taro’s own doing.