Even by the late 1980s, most households did not have camcorders. Most households did not have a home computer. Even fewer had both. Thanks to my dad giving me some old gear as he upgraded, my household did.

Behold, a VHS video intro I did in 1987 on my Radio Shack Color Computer 2. The CoCo only had RF (TV) output and my VHS recorder was an editing deck and did NOT have a TV tuner. Since the CoCo did not have audio/video out, and the recorder did not have RF inputs, I just pointed the camera at my color television and recorded the titles that way.

Oh yeah. State of the art.

I did my original post as a joke, showing a funny (to me) mockup of what a retro BACKROOMS video game on the CoCo might look like ;-)

But if we really are going to try to make some silly game, we need to understand what the game is based on. First, BACKROOMS comes from a photo that was shared online and folks started telling stories about it. You can read the history here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms

And here is that original photo and the description that started it all:

Folks did not know the origin of this photo, at that time, but have since figured it out. It was a photo from a former furniture store (which explains the odd walls) with poor color correction (making it yellow) before that location was turned into a HobbyTown. Apparently.

And the description of this image read:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you”

— Anonymous, 4chan (May 13, 2019)

And thus, the fandom began. Folks wrote stories, created fan wikis, and even made video games based on the lore that was developing around this photo and paragraph.

One such creator was the Kane Pixels channel on YouTube where a teenager began creating his own take on the BACKROOMS lore. His first video was uploaded on January 22, 2022 and has had over 84 million views. The story is that it is a “found footage” video taken from a camcorder that recorded in 1990. You an watch it here to get the idea:

This led to a series of other first-person camcorder type videos recorded at different points in the timeline of this version of the BACKROOMS. The lore Kane Parsons (the real name behind the Kane Pixels channel) created the mysterious corporation A-SYNC Research.

The popularity of his particular take on this meme ended up having the A24 movie company approach him about a theatrical film based on his version. That was the BACKROOMS movie that opened in 2026 with the highest opening release of any A24 movie to date, and making Kane Parsons the youngest director (at age 20) to have a film make that kind of money ;-)

So obviously, any game based on this lore would feature a yellow maze with a first person view of someone wandering around in it.

But not on a 1980s CoCo ;-) On this era hardware, we could convert it into a top-down view of the yellow maze, similar to the 1980 Atari VCS game Adventure. Longtime readers of this blog may recall I have played with doing this type of game on the CoCo in the past by literally translating the game level maps into the CoCo’s 32×16 text screen using the semi graphics block characters:

And, frankly, if someone has not already done an Atari VCS/2600 BACKROOMS game (possibly as a hack to Adventure itself), I would be surprised.

Maybe we can dig into this together and figure out what the game will be. Basically, a player wandering through an endless yellow maze, and entities chasing you… Not much to it. But maybe we can spend some time and flesh out the concept a bit into something fun to play, at least for a few minutes.

To be continued? Maybe…