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A24's Backrooms is such a monstrous hit at the box office that it's giving two co-op horror games, also set in the Backrooms, a massive bump in player numbers.
In what's proving to be an already historic year for horror movies, Backrooms recently set box office records with a worldwide opening-weekend haul of $118 million. The liminal-space horror put up A24's largest debut weekend of all time and made YouTube native Kane Parsons (AKA Kane Pixels) the youngest director ever to top the box office.
Together with the endless online theories and countless memes, the Backrooms movie led to a surge in player numbers for Escape the Backrooms and Backrooms: Escape Together - both of which also riff and expand on the viral 4Chan creepypasta that inspired a shared internet urban myth.
According to SteamDB, Backrooms: Escape Together hit an all-time concurrent player peak with almost 9,000 people logging in at the same time yesterday. The procedurally generated game first hit early access in 2022, but its renewed interested is in part due to an official in-game collaboration with A24 that lets players unlock a clip from the film.
2025's Escape the Backrooms is enjoying a similar resurgence, too. While it hasn't beaten its all-time player peak of 48,879, the game currently hovers around daily peaks of 16,000 players, way up from its average a few months ago.
Escape the Backrooms also stealth dropped into Xbox Game Pass with less notice than a barbed wire shadow monster, mere hours before the movie's release. TrueAchievements reports it's the subscription service's seventh-biggest game launch of the year - above mammoths such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Hades 2, and below the likes of Forza Horizon 6 and Subnautica 2.
I dabbled in as much of Escape the Backrooms as my fragile little heart could manage and thought it recreated its source material's winding, nonsensical, hauntingly mundane corridors really well. Proper scary stuff... until you see the monster goofily chasing whoever you're playing with, all while ignoring you, up to the point it tires and clips out of existence. Still, it's a more than serviceable co-op thrill.
