Glitched into empty space: why video games are obsessed with the Backrooms
Source:
guardianTech
July 27, 2026 · 02:00
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 spacesIt 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, “nocli…
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