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Met starts on 4chan, in a May 2019 thread titled “unpleasant photos”. The first post was a picture showing an empty room with yellow pictures, no natural light and a mysterious color covering half of the wall. Shortly after, another user (no usernames on 4chan, just numerical identification) responded with 78 words that could set future plans. $262 million A24 the feel of the movie.
“If you are not careful and get out of the wrong place, you will be in trouble Back rooms,” the post begins.” For the uninitiated, “noclip” refers to a game where collisions with solid objects are stopped, allowing players to move freely through walls and floors.” Think of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in the movie, finding a wall in the basement of his furniture store and passing through to another world on the other side.
In games, noclip was originally designed to be used by developers to test their creations – but over the years, players have been finding ways to find themselves and access hidden places they didn’t want to see. It is surprising that Studio Chyr’s director William Chyr knows it well, both as a game developer and as an actor.
“Going back, and jumping, and seeing the views of the space, it’s like the Wizard of Oz moment when the screen opens,” says Chyr. He remembers the first encounter with this Batman: Arkham City: “There was a bug that allowed you, if you kept throwing grenades at each other, to keep climbing.” From there, the warrior can climb outside the level, in the parts of Gotham that are only created as a base. “The roads had cars moving, but they were flat.”
Watching Backrooms, Chyr was also reminded of the same flaw as the familiar janky Skyrimwhere holding a wooden plate provided a quick way out of the world. Viewed from the outside, players discovered that most of the game’s “tables” were bottles fixed to the floor – just as the memorable Backrooms were shot in a room where the chairs bounced off the floor. All these things that, in video games, the player is not supposed to see.
The feeling of Kane Parsons movie is much closer to this experience than most of the “official” Backrooms games that have come out. The open nature of these legends (as well as 4chan and Reddit, there are many wikis fans writing and expanding stories) means that it is possible to release your game that is in the Backrooms, using the name and images, in a way that you cannot with another horror video.
The most popular of these games, Escape the Backrooms, was first available in August 2022, a few months after Parsons’ first video. It gives the perfect impression of the beauty of the Backrooms, from the yellow traffic to the yellow hazmat suits worn by the agents of Async, a mysterious organization that was only introduced at the end of the film but the secret of the Internet’s appearance. But these are all just graphics used in the graphics of this massive survival horror game.
At its best, Backrooms taps into the idea that a place has “gone away”, in a way that’s fun but hard to stop. It feels simple, easily broken (as in the film, I would argue) and the presence of deadly monsters. Even more so seeing a player wearing their gas mask and meatball, the blues are jumping through the front lanes.
Fortunately, there are other lines of games inspired by Backrooms that offer nothing more than a self-guided adventure through a place with a mysterious atmosphere and a constant sense of hidden danger.
Pools and Dreamcore both shine brightly at Poolrooms, an infinity pool. I first saw it in one of Parsons’ videos and written by fandom like Section 37 of Backrooms, is a similar unusual method of construction. At Dreamcore, it’s one of the options you can explore. You will also explore “dead malls” and hotel corridors: both abandoned and seemingly endless, like the spaces explored in the film, but with a clear spiritual boundary.
These boutiques and hotels are perfect examples of the growing online taste of the limited space of which Backrooms is just one offshoot.
“The place always looks like it’s been through,” says Chyr. “It’s clear that there was once a human activity here, but there isn’t any more.” His 2025 game Hotel Infinity has all of these ideas, to the point where Hotel Liminal was once considered a title, Chyr says. “But I thought this was just on the nose!”
Set in the lifeless corridors of a hotel that seems to have been designed by MC Escher, it’s a VR game that uses a clever trick to fold endless halls into a 2x2m square for your living room. One late sequence in Backrooms made me think of Chyr’s game – he proves to be thinking the same thing. “I was like, seriously, I wish we could have done this!” he laughs.
Hotel Infinity focuses on the impossible architecture of this place, which it shares Exit 8 (also adapted into a movie this year), a game made in Japan that traps you in the endless corridors of a Tokyo metro station. The other side of the liminal coin is the feeling invoked by the original image of 4chan: the danger of an empty space that no longer has a defined function, or perhaps never did.
One game that highlights this is Interior Worlds, a “photographic” game in which you view such environments with only an SLR camera. The creator of the game, who goes by the moniker Sodaraptor, recalls that he first came across the idea of a limited space “in 2020, when the original Backrooms post on 4chan started to go viral.”
It was a pain he felt in places like that but he didn’t have a name for it. “Strange discomfort”, Sodaraptor says, mixed with the pain of “anemoia”: the nostalgia of a time that happened to you alone.
So it’s only fitting that the inspiration for the scene is now, in video game terms, as old as all the dead stores.
The aforementioned Arkham City and Skyrim both came out in 2011. That same year, Valve released Portal 2, a first-person shooter that Parsons has repeatedly said was his biggest influence. The director also created several Portal fan films; the last one it was uploaded to his YouTube channel in 2021, a few months before the first Backrooms photo.
It’s perhaps inevitable that the 15-year-old sports beauty would make her way into television. Parsons was a young child when Portal 2 came out, and it’s only natural that he – and the next generation of filmmakers – would be introduced to things and dark rooms that he lost as children.
The Minecraft video may already exist (unfortunately) but what would be more interesting are the videos and other artwork created by those who played Minecraft over the years. Those dark caves, endless mines, the sounds of zombies, the threat of arthritis – when these strange phenomena enter the Internet, who knows what will come out and where it will lead us.
