DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
The Outer Limits
Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment
ALEX SPENCER
With hindsight, it was inevitable that I’d reach the Backrooms eventually. As per the original coining, in a 2019 4Chan thread, this is where you end up if you “noclip out of reality in the wrong areas”. Taking the form of mundane, anonymous ‘liminal spaces’ – passed through but never truly inhabited by humans – Backrooms are made creepy by the absence of life, and by the impossibility of their dimensions, familiar scenery cut and pasted, Hanna-Barbera-style, into infinity.
We’ve touched on the idea of imagined realities that exist alongside our own in this column already, and I should note that ‘liminality’ was the theme of the Now Play This event discussed in E398. (As I say, inevitable.) But still Backrooms managed to remain out of view even as they went on to infect TikTok, where the related hashtag has been attached to over half a million posts, and YouTube, led by filmmaker Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms shorts were so successful he’s been signed to make a feature-length version for A24. No, as an old man who works in print media, I only took notice once the idea looped back around to games.