The Sega 32X just got a free Backrooms raycaster game

Indie developer paisleyboxers has released Backrooms 32X, a free first-person raycaster designed to run on authentic Sega 32X hardware. The game brings the internet's most famous liminal space creepypasta to Sega's short-lived 1994 add-on console. It also includes a browser-based level editor for creating custom maps.

Since everyone still seems to be in the Backrooms hype, and I love the 32X, I figured I'd spotlight this free itch.io game. It is available right now on itch.io as a downloadable ROM. You can load it onto a flash cartridge and play it on original hardware. You can also run it through an emulator if you do not have the Genesis attachment sitting in your entertainment center.

Yellow wallpaper on a 32-bit add-on

The Backrooms phenomenon started in 2019 as a 4chan post that showed a creepy, yellow-tinted office space. It exploded into a massive collaborative fiction project about endless, fluorescent-lit labyrinths. Putting this modern internet lore onto a console that died in 1996 is an interesting collision of eras. The Sega 32X only lasted a couple of years on the market before Sega abandoned it to focus on the Saturn. Its library is tiny. Seeing new homebrew push the system's dual Hitachi SH-2 processors to render a 3D raycaster is a technical novelty.

The 32X is no stranger to raycasting engines. Doom was a launch title for the add-on in 1994. That port was famously rushed. It suffered from missing levels and a bordered screen to save processing power. Backrooms 32X takes a different approach. It focuses entirely on the eerie, empty aesthetic of the liminal space genre. There are no demons to shoot. The horror comes entirely from the endless, repeating yellow walls and the hum of fluorescent lights.

The original photograph that sparked the Backrooms craze was finally identified in 2024 as a renovated furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The image had a distinct, unsettling quality that translated perfectly into video games. Translating that 2002 digital camera aesthetic to the color palette and resolution limits of a mid-90s Sega console works surprisingly well. The hardware's natural limitations actually enhance the gritty, degraded look of the footage.

Build your own maze in the browser

The companion tools are the most surprising part of the package. The developer built a web-based level editor. You can design your own custom Backrooms floors directly in your browser, export the data, and inject it into the game. This fits perfectly with the collaborative nature of the original creepypasta. Players are actively expanding the geometry instead of just wandering through a pre-baked maze.

Pushing the dual SH-2 processors

The developer behind this project, paisleyboxers, is an independent creator who previously worked on smaller titles like Space Intruders. Building a functional raycaster for the 32X is a massive step up in complexity. The Sega 32X homebrew scene is incredibly small compared to the standard Genesis or the Dreamcast. The hardware sold poorly, and the documentation was historically terrible.

Anyone writing code for it today has to navigate a bizarre architecture that splits tasks between the Motorola 68000 in the Genesis and the two SH-2 chips in the mushroom-shaped add-on. Developers have to synchronize the base hardware with the add-on's processors. Backrooms 32X handles the rendering well enough to capture the claustrophobic, sickening yellow atmosphere of the source material.