Glitched into empty space: why video games are obsessed with the Backrooms

The horror movie sensation of 2026 has its roots in gaming’s discovery of ‘noclip’ – and the hidden virtual realms that could be opened up inside games.

Developers explain how everyone got lost in these liminal spaces It starts on 4chan, in a May 2019 thread entitled “unsettling images”.

The first post was a photo showing an empty room with the now iconic yellow wallpaper, no natural lighting and a kind of inexplicable jutting half-wall.

Shortly afterwards, another user (there are no usernames on 4chan, just identifying numbers) responded with 78 words of text that would essentially lay out the blueprint for a future $262m A24 movie sensation . “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” the post begins.

For the uninitiated, “noclip” refers to a game mode in which collision with solid objects is disabled, allowing players to move freely through walls and floors.

Think of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character in the film, finding a permeable wall in the basement of his furniture store and passing through to the world on the other side. Continue reading...

References

• Original
  Glitched into empty space: why video games are obsessed with the Backrooms