The chilling horror sensation that has captivated audiences, the A24 film 'Backrooms', has its surprising genesis not in a traditional writer's room, but in the obscure corners of online gaming culture. What began as a single image and a short textual description on the anonymous imageboard 4chan in May 2019 has since evolved into a sprawling internet mythos, culminating in a cinematic hit that has reportedly grossed £262 million.
The core concept, as outlined in that initial viral post, revolves around the idea of 'noclipping' out of reality. For those unfamiliar with gaming terminology, 'noclip' refers to a developer mode that disables collision detection, allowing users to pass through solid objects like walls and floors. While intended for game testing and debugging, players have, for decades, discovered glitches and exploits to access this mode, inadvertently stumbling into the hidden, unfinished, and often unsettling areas beyond the intended game boundaries.
William Chyr, creative director at Studio Chyr, a game development company, is deeply familiar with this phenomenon from both a creator's and player's perspective. He describes the experience of 'noclipping' and seeing the underlying logic of a game's space as a 'Wizard of Oz moment,' pulling back the curtain on the magic. Chyr recalls an early encounter with such a glitch in 'Batman: Arkham City', where players could exploit a grenade spamming bug to ascend beyond the playable level, revealing sections of Gotham City that were merely flat textures, never meant for close inspection.
Similarly, the notoriously glitchy 'Skyrim' offered another example, where holding a wooden plate could allow players to 'noclip' out of the world. This often exposed the rudimentary construction of the game environment, such as tables being revealed as bookcases partially embedded in the ground – a visual parallel to the disorienting, incomplete furniture seen in the iconic 'Backrooms' imagery. These unintentional glimpses into the game's construction foster a sense of unease and the uncanny, central to the 'Backrooms' appeal.
Kane Parsons' 'Backrooms' film, according to Chyr, successfully captures this specific feeling of a space being 'off' – an unsettling quality that is hard to define. While many 'official' Backrooms-inspired games have emerged since the mythos gained traction, the most effective often focus on this liminal atmosphere rather than introducing overt threats. The open-source nature of the 'Backrooms' lore, extensively catalogued on fan wikis and platforms like Reddit, has allowed for a proliferation of fan-made content, including games that faithfully recreate the distinctive yellow hallways and unsettling aesthetics, sometimes incorporating elements like the mysterious Async organisation from the film.
However, the delicate balance of this unsettling atmosphere can be easily broken. Chyr suggests that the introduction of overt killer monsters, or the sight of other players in incongruous outfits, can shatter the subtle dread that makes the Backrooms so compelling. Some newer Backrooms-inspired games, such as 'Pools' and 'Dreamcore', have opted instead for self-guided tours through increasingly strange environments, focusing on the creeping sense of weirdness and the constant, implied threat lurking just out of sight, rather than explicit jump scares.