The original photo
The first known photo of The Backrooms surfaced on 4chan’s /x/ board in May of 2019, a single eerie image with accompanying text:
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.
Noclipping explained
In computer games, “clipping” is the intersection of two objects where one obscures the other concealing it from view. For example, if a video game character runs at the wall, the character stops because it has collided with the wall. Sometimes the character’s “bounding box” is more basic than the actual character “model”, causing an arm or leg to “clip” through the wall. This technique can sometimes be used to cheat, allowing players to see through walls and doors that they normally couldn’t, or pass through solid objects by avoiding the proper collision detection. This bug is known as “noclipping”.
Async research facility
On July 2nd, 1988 the Async research facility tested it’s low-proximity magnetic distortion system for the third time. Details regarding the results of the experimentation were not released.
However, we do know that their sixth test, on October 17th the following year was successful in opening up the Threshold to The Backrooms.
During an earlier press conference, Ivan Beck, vice director of the Async foundation, described the intention of these tests, stating that the program, if granted sufficient backing from the United States government, will offer a solution to all current and future storage and residential needs, and save billions of dollars on property construction and management.