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BrVR started as a “this probably isn’t possible” idea that slowly got out of hand and grew in clear phases as we figured out what the tech, the hardware, and our own sanity could handle.

In 2021, stuck at home during COVID, Paul and John were spending too many late nights scrolling Backrooms Wikidot and watching VR videos instead of actually relaxing. The thought that kept coming back was simple: why is nobody trying to walk through the wiki itself in VR, level by level, like a living document? At first it was just a father and son talking big: grab a few iconic images, try to build them in Unreal, and share them as a single high-effort Reddit post the community might enjoy. That was the original scope, a cool post or maybe a short demo, nothing more.

Phase One was nothing glamorous, just basic themed mazes. The goal was not to be clever, it was to be honest: how big can these spaces get before performance drops, how many entities can a level really handle, and what kind of layouts actually feel like the Backrooms instead of just random corridors. Those early builds were our crash test dummies. They let us watch frame rates, VR sickness, and all the ugly edge cases so we would know the real limits before we tried anything more ambitious.
 

At the same time, there was a very specific spark from the community. On our Discord, before BrVR was anything close to what it is now, a user we half-jokingly refer to as our Divine Inspiration asked if anyone was ever going to make a proper Backrooms VR experience. We were already toying with the idea of bringing the Wikidot images into Unreal, but only as static scenes. That was the original plan, and it felt reasonable.
 

The problem was, we had just gotten a Quest 2 for Christmas and we really wanted to make the pics come alive in VR. Once you can move your hands, lean around corners, and feel the space around you, being glued to a single snapshot room suddenly seems like a waste. So the plan quietly shifted. Instead of just recreating the Wikidot pictures as static dioramas, we started asking what would happen if you could walk out of the frame, go behind the camera, and keep walking.
 

Because it is a family project, BrVR has always had to fit around real life: day jobs, school, bills, and old hardware that needed to be pushed to its limits before the game could afford upgrades. We started with two aging PCs and slowly improved them as sales and a small but encouraging Patreon began to show signs of life. When people talk about “the devs,” what they are really seeing is a lot of late-night work where one of us is deep in code while the other is buried in level layouts, art, or community messages.
 

John handles all of the programming, from core systems to countless fixes and refinements, and he also built many of the early mazes that defined how BrVR should feel to move through. I naturally gravitated toward more detailed level work, shaping spaces to match the mood of the source images and the feel of the Backrooms. The first full level we built was Level 37’s massive jungle, and the first entity we ever showed publicly was a video of a Clump dragging me in to be eaten in VR, which set the tone for how intense and personal we wanted the encounters to feel.

Over time, our roles settled into something that plays to both our strengths. I now handle most of the level design, as well as the website, social media, marketing, and a lot of the day-to-day community management. John takes on the heavy technical lifting behind the scenes and still wears a lot of hats, especially when it comes to keeping the Discord running smoothly and responding to players. There is a constant back-and-forth between design and code, where John makes the impossible work and I focus on making the spaces feel like somewhere you remember having been, even if you have only ever seen them online.
 

From the start, the target was not just another horror walking sim with a Backrooms skin. The internal pitch was: what if the Backrooms wiki itself was a place you walk through. That meant letting players choose their tone, from pure liminal wandering to full survival horror and everything in between. The “play your way” options, like turning off entities, gore, or firearms, grew out of an early realization from Discord feedback and constant streaming on YouTube that many Backrooms fans do not actually want constant jump scares. A lot of them want to exist in those spaces for hours, headphones on and lights off, letting the ambience do the work. The design goal became simple: scare the people who want to be hunted, but also leave room for people who just want to sink into the weirdness.
 

The community did not show up as part of a marketing plan. It arrived as people who were already emotionally invested in the Backrooms and instantly protective of what BrVR could become. They were part of an early adoption of Backrooms games and for us that is intensified by the bleeding edge of VR at the time. Flat games are hard to make, but VR often feels impossible. Just setting up the Dev environment stops most people cold in their tracks. The first rough custom levels and lore pitches that hit Discord were messy, but they proved something important. Players do not just want to consume Backrooms content, they want to leave fingerprints on it. That is why there is a path for rough level submissions, why names end up on stores, props, and easter eggs, and why community made levels are treated as real parts of the labyrinth instead of throwaway side content. Behind the scenes, that is chaotic. Bringing in community ideas means constantly balancing performance, lore coherence, and the risk that one exciting idea might break multiple existing systems. The reward is a game that grows like a strange, collaborative organism instead of a neatly closed product. The tail on this beast is long and growing daily.
 

Because BrVR started small and personal, it never really had a clean “ship it and move on” endpoint. The mindset has always been long haul. Phase One mazes gave us hard data on performance and scale. The community call for a proper Backrooms VR experience gave us permission to aim higher than a neat 360 viewer. And the Quest 2 gave us the itch to turn screenshots into places you could actually inhabit, not just look at. The inspiration comes from our amazing community who supports us in so many ways. As long as players keep finding new corners of the Backrooms they want to explore in VR, the plan is to keep building, refining, and expanding. Work on BrVR runs alongside other projects like Bread or Dead VR, and when those projects succeed, they help fund better tools, better hardware, and more time, which loops back into making BrVR’s levels, entities, and interactions more ambitious.

Thanks for reading!

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