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| ▲ | WorldMaker 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "Backrooms" don't just come from videogames. They are meant to represent liminal spaces like "endless" cubical farms and conference rooms and the back offices of movie studios or any other modern business. (Even the idea that on the backside of the cool theme park structure that seems so otherworldly is just a couple of boring janitor's closets and hallways for staff/crew to navigate between shifts.) The videogames building "unused" rooms like this were in part trying for verisimilitude to these sort of "just around the corner" spaces that exist in so many buildings. Often as a joke. It was a part of the humor of Duke Nukem. It was a key part to the humor of Portal. It was the entire basis of The Stanley Parable. 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". | | |
| ▲ | stackghost 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | >"Backrooms" don't just come from videogames It's where the concept originated. | | |
| ▲ | breezeTrowel 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The concept did not originate in videogames. The whole thing started from a 4chan post where someone posted a photo of a yellow interior. Then, in 2022, Kane Parsons created a viral YouTube video based on that post. You can see it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo . The video game adaptations all came later. Wikipedia has a good writeup here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms | | |
| ▲ | stackghost 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >The concept did not originate in videogames. 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 | |
| ▲ | carabiner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 90% of modern memes, internet culture, and therefore a huge proportion of current pop culture, originated on 4chan. | |
| ▲ | krapp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've had dreams like this - I think a lot of people have - where you find yourself trapped in a space, an office or a mall or wherever, one common version seems to be a public bathroom - and you keep moving through an endless maze of doors that lead nowhere. The article has it wrong, this was a archetype of the human collective unconscious well before 4chan turned it into a meme. | | |
| ▲ | breezeTrowel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which article is wrongm Both the article and Wikipedia entry focus on The Backrooms which are a type of liminal space. Yes, liminal spaces have existed in fiction, dreams, etc. However, here the discussion is on The Backrooms and how that idea and aesthetic became very popular very quickly. |
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| ▲ | albedoa 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is not where the concept originated. |
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| ▲ | taeric 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This feels like a silly over emphasis on a naming that ignores how alike it is to so many things that came before. Don't even have to go too far back to get stories of people finding themselves in a fantasy world through a wardrobe. 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. |
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