The Backrooms have a birthday, and it's blurry. The yellow-room photo was already floating around 4chan by April 2018, a year before it had a name. On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user started a thread on the paranormal board, /x/, asking for pictures that felt "off." Someone posted that photo, and another anonymous user replied with the first description of a place you can fall into by accident and never find your way out of. The name stuck. Nobody signed it. Nobody owned it.
The photo itself is a renovation snapshot. It was taken in 2002 inside a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and a HobbyTown shop posted it online in 2003. Backrooms fans traced it using the Wayback Machine in May 2024. A hobby shop's remodel became the most famous hallway on the internet.
So when a major studio and a trademark registry both started acting like the Backrooms belonged to somebody, the internet noticed.
A24 Asks Redbubble to Pull the Wallpaper
Kane Parsons turned a 2022 YouTube short into a web series, and then into A24's Backrooms, which opened May 29, 2026. This summer, a Reddit user reported that A24 Films LLC had asked Redbubble to take down fan art built on the yellow wallpaper pattern. Artists and sellers who'd been making Level 0 art for years started asking whether the hallway was suddenly off limits.
Parsons replied that he was looking into it and that it shouldn't be happening. On Friday, July 17, A24 put out a statement saying it "makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper," the original post, or community works built around it, and that creatives "have every right to tell their own version of the story." The claim was withdrawn. Reports at the time didn't say what legal basis the original request relied on.
Whatever the basis, the wallpaper is a 2002 snapshot of someone else's renovation, and the story around it was written piece by piece by strangers. There isn't an obvious owner to claim it, and A24's statement said as much.
The Trademark in Warsaw
The second story is quieter and a lot weirder. In February 2025, the US Patent and Trademark Office registered the word BACKROOMS (registration number 7699612) to Gigant Films, a company in Warsaw, Poland. They filed in August 2022 through the Madrid system, which lets a foreign applicant extend a home-country filing into the US. It's a plain word mark, not a logo and not the wallpaper image. The listing names a long string of classes, including video games and online game services, DVDs, bags, jewelry, books, advertising and clothing. The public record shows no US use of the mark yet, which a Madrid filing doesn't need to show at the start.
How does a word from a creepypasta thread end up registered? The public record doesn't say, but the process explains a lot. A trademark examiner checks whether a new mark conflicts with marks already on the register. Where a word came from isn't part of the test. Trademark law protects a name as a brand on particular goods and services, which is a separate thing from owning an idea, a meme or a photograph. Copyright covers creative works. Trademark covers who a customer thinks is behind a product. A word can be born in a thread nobody owns and still be registered by someone as a brand, as long as nobody stops it. The application was published for opposition on January 7, 2025, and the listing shows no opposition.
The Video Game
The USPTO has already cited the registration. On June 20, 2025, Triiodide Studios, an indie studio in Boston, applied to register BACKROOMS: ESCAPE TOGETHER for "providing online video games." The game is a hit on Steam, in early access since October 2022, with roughly 15,000 reviews at 89 percent positive. On November 15, 2025, a USPTO examining attorney issued a nonfinal office action refusing the application under Section 2(d), the likelihood-of-confusion rule.
The examiner's logic runs like this. BACKROOMS is the dominant part of the applicant's mark, and it's identical to the registrant's entire mark. Adding words to a registered mark usually doesn't set it apart, and the action cited older cases on that point. Consumers also tend to read the first word of a mark first. On top of that, the examiner pointed to Call of Duty, Minecraft and others to show that game companies routinely name sequels and spin-offs by tacking words onto a base title, so a player seeing "Backrooms: Escape Together" could assume it came from the same source as "Backrooms." The registration covers downloadable games, games on disc and online game services, and the applicant's service is online video games, so the examiner called them related.
The examiner cited only the game-related goods and services from the registration. The clothing wasn't part of it, and the action says the rest of the listing, which includes clothing, wasn't cited.
The action also raised an earlier-filed pending application, ESCAPE THE BACKROOMS, which Trademarkia now lists as registered since April 2026 under Scaretech Studios. We couldn't see whether Gigant's registration was raised against that one. The other Backrooms filings on the register are a mix: one abandoned, one cancelled in 2024, and a trading card game and a game called Benny's Backrooms both still pending.
A nonfinal office action isn't a verdict. It starts a back-and-forth, and applicants can argue, amend or negotiate. The deadline to respond was February 15, 2026, extendable to May 15. The latest status we could find, from September 2026, still shows the application pending, and the game is still on sale. We don't know what Triiodide filed in response. One fun wrinkle for the lawyers: Gigant's filing date is August 10, 2022, and Triiodide's paperwork claims first use on September 1, 2022. Dates matter in trademark disputes. We'll leave that one to people with law degrees.
What It Means for Anyone Making Things
Nobody here is a lawyer, including us, and nothing in this post is legal advice. The public record shows that the wallpaper and the concept aren't what this registration covers, and A24 has said in writing it isn't claiming them. The registration covers the word as a brand, and the USPTO has shown it will cite that registration when a new product is named close to it in a related field. Whether it would hold up if someone challenged it is a question for an attorney.
We sell Backrooms gear, so we have a stake in this. We're keeping our Backrooms designs up. Naming a shirt after the thing it depicts isn't the same as naming a game after someone's brand, and the wallpaper, the hallway and the whole liminal-space idea belong to everybody. That's one shop's read of a public record, not a legal conclusion. If you're planning to name something Backrooms, a short consult with an IP attorney costs a lot less than a rename.
The Backrooms started as a place nobody owned. Mostly, it still is.
