I first came across the concept of Backrooms back in 2022. Unless mistaken, I think that's where I first read about it anyways. It was a PC Gamer article "Noclipping is no joke: the strange world of The Backrooms explained" article which introduced me to "The Backrooms" — a concept that had started as a single creepy image posted anonymously on 4chan back in 2019. Just a photo of a yellowed, fluorescent-lit room that felt deeply, inexplicably wrong. No people. No context. Just endless, empty office space that seemed to go on forever.
The description that came with it didn't help remove the confusion: "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in The Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms."
WTF? 😦
The article went on to explain the origins of The Backrooms and mentioned Kane Parsons (known online as Kane Pixels), a 16 year old Youtuber that had taken that single creepy image and turned it into something extraordinary. Using Blender and After Effects — tools he'd taught himself — uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube on January 7, 2022. Minutes and minutes of found-footage horror set inside those endless yellow corridors. No budget. No film school. Just a teenager with a laptop and a gift for dread.
I went down the rabbit hole that evening. Watched the videos. Then went to Wikipedia to make sense of it all.
Then completely forgot all about it.
