Posted by anarbadalov 8 hours ago
"Backrooms" are liminal spaces that exist outside the geometry of our world. It comes from video games, where if you enabled developer modes to let you pass through the normal level geometry, sometimes you'd find leftover/unused rooms and hallways that players cannot normally access.
I think we can argue that real world places that inspired our fantasy Dungeons were similar liminal spaces: the creepy basement hallways that connected staff/crew (servants) access to other parts of the building(s) above. The multi-use spaces below that are most remembered in pop culture for such uses as torture and imprisonment, but were also often staging grounds for much more boring household logistics tasks (storage), and even equivalents to conference rooms, janitor closets, and "offices".
It's where the concept originated.
Wikipedia has a good writeup here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms
Yes it did. "noclipping out of reality" is a metaphor that is nonsense outside the context of videogame worlds. The 4chan copypasta that popularized the Backrooms meme doesn't mention video games but that particular post is not the origin of the backrooms concept.
There are literal backrooms you can noclip into existing in games that that predate that 4chan post by several years
The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it into a meme.
How many stories were about hidden worlds below our own? Isn't even that much different from "turtles all the way." Heck, even the Minecraft movie played with a literal mine going into a magical world.
I wrote a computer game where a paper airplane flies room to room… It occurred to me that I was not indirectly surfacing this "endlessly scrolling building" that has recurred so often in what I suppose are nightmares(?).
At the same time, memory being what it is, I worry that the reverse is true—that the game I write inspired the nightmares (and that I now miss-remember when they began, misattribute them to my teenage years).
There is at times a feeling of infinite possibility when I find myself in these places while dreaming. I always enjoy exploring new places and so a place with infinite rooms, hallways, floors is going to keep me busy.
When I learned of Kowloon Walled City [1][2], that caught my attention. I've seen too descriptions of the underground portions of Hong Kong [3] that let you move from place to place without every stepping outside. The movie "Chungking Express" gives off that vibe [4]. The imaginary prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi [5].
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/...
[2] http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-xI_c78etYDc/T61_qAwHWFI/AA...
[3] https://weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hong-kong...
Of course, it may be influenced by the fact that I spent ~15 years in the Boston area, and while New York is the city that never sleeps, Boston can get hauntingly empty late at night, or even on Sunday afternoon when most everything's closed...
For a great Kowloon-influenced atmospheric game, check out Stray.
