The Backrooms originated from a 2019 4chan post on the /x/ board, featuring an unsettling image of a yellow, carpeted office space with an eerie sense of emptiness. It quickly evolved into a massive collaborative fiction project involving endless levels, mysterious entities, and the concept of no-clipping out of reality into a glitchy, infinite dimension. The meme resonates due to the liminal space aesthetic—places that feel strangely familiar yet deeply disturbing because they are devoid of life. Today, it is used to describe feelings of being lost in repetitive environments or to poke fun at glitchy real-world architecture that feels like it belongs in another realm.