Glitched into empty space: why video games are obsessed with the Backrooms
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- The Backrooms originated from a May 2019 4chan thread titled "unsettling images," where a user posted 78 words about "noclipping out of reality" into yellow-wallpapered rooms—the basis for A24's $262m film.
- Kane Parsons cited Valve's Portal 2 (2011) as his biggest influence on the Backrooms film, having made Portal fan-videos before uploading his first Backrooms clip to YouTube in 2021.
- Noclip glitches in 2011 games Batman: Arkham City and Skyrim allowed players to escape level boundaries, revealing flat textures and furniture clipping through floors—visual parallels the article draws directly to the Backrooms aesthetic.
- Escape the Backrooms launched in early access in August 2022, just months after Parsons' first video, but the piece argues it applies the mythos as wallpaper over a standard multiplayer survival horror game rather than capturing the original feeling.
- William Chyr's Hotel Infinity uses VR spatial trickery to fold endless Escher-like hotel corridors into a 2x2m patch of living-room floor, sharing the Backrooms' focus on impossible architecture rather than monsters.
- Developer Sodaraptor of Interior Worlds said they first named the sensation of empty, purposeless places in 2020 when the original Backrooms post went viral, describing it as "anemoia"—nostalgia for an era predating your own experience.
Why it matters: The piece argues the Backrooms succeeded because it tapped into a 15-year gaming vocabulary of "going behind the curtain" through noclip, glitches, and liminal spaces that filmmaker Kane Parsons grew up immersed in. For studios tracking where the next wave of horror aesthetics will come from, the article signals Minecraft-era kids are the next cohort whose formative gaming nightmares will shape cinema.
