With hindsight, it was inevitable that I’d reach the Backrooms eventually. As per the original coining, in a 2019 4Chan thread, this is where you end up if you “noclip out of reality in the wrong areas”. Taking the form of mundane, anonymous ‘liminal spaces’ – passed through but never truly inhabited by humans – Backrooms are made creepy by the absence of life, and by the impossibility of their dimensions, familiar scenery cut and pasted, Hanna-Barbera-style, into infinity.
We’ve touched398. (As I say, inevitable.) But still Backrooms managed to remain out of view even as they went on to infect TikTok, where the related hashtag has been attached to over half a million posts, and YouTube, led by filmmaker Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms shorts were so successful he’s been signed to make a feature-length version for A24. No, as an old man who works in print media, I only took notice once the idea looped back around to games.
