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All breakthrough technologies need their 'mainstream moment:' just look at the Apple Macintosh, the iPhone, and more recently what ChatGPT did for AI.
At the same time, seismic shifts often emerge from unexpected beginnings. It's not so long ago that we were frolicking around with AI and laughing at its amorphous depictions of Duke Nukem, and now we're grappling with the reality that it's going to play a big part in the future of gaming (and, well, everything). Backrooms is another case in point: a phenomenon that's gone on a journey from real estate photograph, to elaborate online mythos, to highly rated A24 movie.
So there's something apt about quantum computing's first real consumer outing arriving dressed as the Backrooms—a phenomenon built around liminal spaces and dimensions where the rules refuse to behave the way our brains want them to. Moth, the London-based quantum company, has launched a browser-based Backrooms game it bills as 'the world's first quantum consumer product', using actual quantum computers from IBM and IQM to generate gameplay mechanics.
The pitch underneath the playfulness is a bold one: quantum computing has been a glimmer on the fringes of gaming for a while, popping up here and there (and both places at once) to tickle our imaginations about future possibilities. But it’s been waiting for its breakthrough moment, and Moth is stepping up to do something about it. For years the sector's headlines have been hardware milestones and dense announcements that mean little outside a lab. Quantum Backrooms flips that — no physics degree required, no jargon, just open a browser and play.
So what does this mean in-game? To quote the team behind the game: "Room configurations are not fixed in advance; they are resolved by the evolution of a quantum algorithm, playing out in gameplay. As a result, observing a space, looking away, and observing it again can produce a different outcome, reflecting a new collapse of the underlying wave function."
Under the hood, each qubit maps to a chunk of the world, and the connections between those qubits decide which paths through the maze are even possible.
It's available to play now for free. I did, and playing it truly is like a digital manifestation of all the bafflement I felt trying to wrap my head around quantum theory when I first read about it years ago. It’s designed to resemble ‘navigating an actual Quantum Processing Unity (QPU),’ which makes for an unsettling yet intriguing experience.
Each grid-based stride you take through the iconic yellow-tinged maze, you see walls flickering into and out of existence around you. Just as you're about to reach out for a precious visor that lets you navigate this quantum matrix a little easier, a wall might generate before you and force you to work your way around it. There were even moments where I would hit a wall then turn around to find myself fully boxed in. Is this what Schrodinger's Cat felt like? Am I now shimmering in quantum uncertainty until someone opens the ceiling above me to pop me into existence?
Some semblance of order begins to form when you pull things away from first-person view to the top-down map view. From here, the game resembles a wall-shifting Pac-Man, and having an overview of how walls quantum-phase from one place to the next, it almost felt like I could read their rhythm and plan my own accordingly. You can also see the otherwise invisible enemies as red dots, who are thankfully restricted to the same grid-based movement as you.
From this perspective, you start to see glimmers of how quantum weirdness can mesh with video games.
With its grid-based movement and pursuit from a hostile force, Quantum Backrooms is also reminiscent of the 1981 game 3D Monster Maze, widely regarded as the original survival horror game, while the oppressive fog recalls early 3D console shooters grappling with poor draw distances. At the same time as harking back to the past, there is a lingering foreboding that this is the first contact with a technology from the future.
The headline here isn’t the game itself, but what this experiment signals for the industry. Quantum computing could soon drive procedural generation untethered from classical computing bottlenecks, or allow developers to create NPCs that weigh player actions across a near-endless space of responses.
Clearly, this game is the start, and not the final destination for quantum-powered gaming. Quantum computers themselves are in a phase of fast-paced development, but not yet the finished product.
Moth has its sights set beyond one game: the platform powering Quantum Backrooms is being opened up to creators, developers and studios — already in the hands of a small group of alpha users, with a wider launch tipped for later this year — so they can build quantum applications without a deep understanding of quantum computing. As Moth’s founder puts it, the next leap "will not come from quantum hardware alone; it comes when the rest of us start playing with it and dreaming up what it's for.”
This strangest of renditions of the already strange Backrooms is a tentative glimpse into a whole new dimension of computing. How far will it all go? That's probably like asking how far will AI go, or how big the Backrooms are, and it'll be down to future game developers to no-clip into this new world and start uncovering its true meaning for gaming. What's certain is that Moth is the first company to go there, and if you want to keep up with their latest quantum-powered games and developer tools you can follow them on X and Instagram.
