A researcher says he cracked the Nintendo Switch 2, and had Hatsune Miku race through Mario Kart World to prove it.
Nintendo spent the past year chasing piracy through every courtroom it could find, and in September a judge ordered a Reddit moderator to pay $4.5 million over pirated Switch games, yet the jailbreak claim that surfaced this week began inside a Switch 1 coding game.
Researcher jailbroke the Switch 2 with a coding game
Sammy Hajhamid, who goes by pepsipu, announced ns2jb on X this week, and his blog post walked through every step.
The software-only tethered jailbreak targeted Switch 2 firmware 23.0.1 and ran arbitrary native code, and Hajhamid called it, to his knowledge, the “first such exploit for the Switch 2.”
OpenAI’s Codex spotted a flaw in SmileBASIC 4, a Switch 1 coding game that also runs on the newer console, and the exploit built outward from there until it reached the system’s file service.
For the demo, Codex modded Mario Kart World with Cinnamoroll, Peter Griffin, and Hatsune Miku, a job Hajhamid said took one day of vibecoding, whereas the jailbreak itself ate roughly two weeks of his time, and his post added that he and his friends would “get cooked by bots.”
Nintendo Life reported that SmileBASIC 4 appeared to vanish from the eShop soon afterward, and TechSpot added that the game disappeared from the US and Europe while Japan kept it, though it could not say whether Nintendo or developer SmileBoom pulled it.
Nintendo has not publicly acknowledged the jailbreak, and only people who already own the game can run it, though the tethered setup resets whenever the console shuts down. SmileBASIC, for its part, also served homebrew exploits during the 3DS era.
Meanwhile, Nintendo’s user agreement, updated before the console launched, already allowed it to render a Switch 2 permanently unusable for anyone who circumvents its protections.
