Co-dev case study: How Blackbird Interactive and Secret Mode helped Escape the Backrooms ride the Backrooms hype wave

Editor's note : After our excellent conversation with Blackbird Interactive and other co-dev experts on the Game Developer Podcast , we wanted to know more about the process and planning of co-dev projects. Today's dev-authored piece explores how an experienced co-dev studio helped a solo-developed game reach new audiences and solve fundamental production challenges.

The Backrooms is a creepypasta Cambrian Explosion of unprecedented scale. Over seven short years, it has ballooned into a shared universe encompassing massive wikis, viral videos, and a movie that just shattered several box office records (like best opening weekend for an original horror movie in history). All of this born from a single, eerie photograph posted on 4chan in 2019.

The Backrooms' influence on gaming has been no less pervasive. It almost single-handedly popularized the aesthetic of liminal spaces, becoming a clear reference point for other hit games like The Exit 8 (which also got its own film last year). On Steam, there are over 270 released games with at least one review that use Backrooms in their title—over 85 of them launching in 2025. But none of these projects have managed to eclipse the popularity of one game in particular: Escape the Backrooms .

With over 4 million players across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch 2, Escape the Backrooms has become the most popular way to explore this extradimensional, puke-yellow maze of fluorescent lights and musty carpet. It started as a side project of an amateur indie developer and YouTube creator. But, like the creepypasta that inspired it, Escape the Backrooms quickly snowballed into something much bigger.

The solo developer of Escape the Backrooms is an enigmatic person known only by his pseudonym, Fancy. He's an exceptionally rare breed of creator. The type who can somehow juggle school and a part-time job while also running a highly-successful YouTube channel and solo develop a hit video game. No biggie.

Escape the Backrooms hit Steam Early Access in August of 2022 and peaked just shy of 1,000 concurrent players (CCU). Months prior, Fancy had released a pair of YouTube devlogs that each earned millions of eyeballs apiece. That success compounded significantly over the next two years across three major updates, two seasonal events, and 22 hotfixes. When Fancy released the Part 4 update in January of 2024, Escape the Backrooms peaked at 16.5K CCU. But then that progress ground to a halt as he set out to port the games to consoles.

In an August 2025 video and Steam blog , Fancy revealed that he had hit a wall: Despite pouring all his free time and energy into it, developing content while also porting Escape the Backrooms to consoles (in addition to making videos and keeping the community up to date) was simply too many hats for one person to wear. So, he had taken time out of developing to find a partner who could take over the project and help him get it done.

Fancy announced he'd joined forces with Secret Mode , the UK-based publisher of games like Chained Together , Still Wakes the Deep , and the upcoming Star Wars: Galactic Racer . While Secret Mode was equipped to take over publishing and marketing for Escape the Backrooms , it still needed an external team to own development and help with the exponentially growing list of programming and engineering challenges behind bringing a multiplayer game to current gen consoles. Thankfully, Secret Mode didn't have to look far.

Amid the tectonic shifts that continue to rock the games industry, we at BBI found stability in leveraging the unique expertise of our veteran teams through co-development. Though we started as a 30-person, boutique studio, we now are home to 200 staff spread across a range of incredible partnerships like Starfield's recent Free Lanes and Terran Armada updates, Subnautica's Switch ports, numerous Minecraft partnerships and our own original games like Hardspace: Shipbreaker .

Typically, co-development engagements involve a lengthy process where a request for proposal (RFP) is circulated among networks of vendors. They compete across budget, expertise, and creative proposals to prove why they're the perfect partner to enlist. Our involvement with Escape the Backrooms unfolded slightly differently: BBI and Secret Mode had recently become sibling organizations through a mutual investment partner in Emona Capital.

Working together was already something we were both keen to do, and once we took the time to understand Secret Mode's ambitions and timelines for Escape the Backrooms , we felt strongly that we had the right people and processes to make it a reality. Soon after, Project Minotaur, our internal codename, was formally kicked off. Now we just had to execute, and our first major deadline was fast approaching.

Work on Project Minotaur formally began in September 2025. The initial project scope was broken down into three core pieces:

● Ship 1.0 on PC, Xbox, and PS5 by October 23.

● Develop a Switch 2 version from scratch to launch early 2026.

● Add new features and improvements through regular content updates to bridge the gap

The team started with just two staff: One producer and a lead engineer doing foundational work necessary before onboarding the rest of the team. By October, that roster included a lead and tech designer, a 3D environment artist, and two more senior engineers to tackle console builds and gameplay systems concurrently. Though we started as fast as we could, with a quick launch coming up we were behind right out of the gate. Even a delay of a week or two would've been disastrous. Fortunately, we weren't starting from scratch.

Fancy had already made significant progress on a 1.0 build for PC and PS5 and Xbox. Where he stalled out was on the mountain of optimizations, bug fixes, and other backend work necessary to ensure smooth performance on consoles. Our job was to ensure a buttery-smooth handover of source files, then get it over the finish line so we could turn our attention to post-launch updates and the Switch 2 version. But now Escape the Backrooms needed to transform from the project of a solo indie developer to support the needs of a bigger, faster team. Even now, our engineers have to constantly make tactical decisions about what to refactor and what to leave as is. Sometimes those decisions are obvious. When we first got access to the source code, there was very little in terms of an automated build pipeline because why would a solo developer ever need to elaborate scaffolding to cook, test, and review nightly builds?

Similarly, why would a solo developer need rigorous documentation detailing the architecture patterns and logic flow of systems? Even getting the project to open on our workstations took some time as we worked closely with Fancy (who continued to be an asset to our team throughout) to reverse-engineer his exact cocktail of plugins, SDKs, and Unreal Engine 4 branches. These were foundational building blocks for a professional team working in lockstep with a publisher.

Image via Fancy/Blackbird Interactive/Secret Mode

Other times, the way forward was less obvious. As the team executed tactical strikes on a laundry list of high-priority bugs and optimizations needed for 1.0, they were simultaneously charting how each system, actor, and logic fit together (sometimes even using community wikis to understand the end result of complex systems like enemy AI). They also had to adapt to how the project used Blueprints for virtually everything, creating cascading consequences for how they approached source control, asynchronous development, and building out new features.

While these challenges were sometimes tricky to work with, they also weren't unexpected. But this is game dev. There's always something unexpected. We got our first surprise almost right away when Secret Mode's own testing of the console ports turned up a major problem: The Xbox and PS5 console builds each had networking implementations that weren't equipped to facilitate peer-to-peer matchmaking across a subset of possible player internet and firewall configurations. While many players would be just fine, others wouldn't be able to play multiplayer at all. This wasn't an issue on Steam because Escape the Backrooms already relied on Steam APIs to ensure a consistently good experience. But these networking services are exclusive (and mandatory, in the case of consoles) to each platform. It's one of the biggest reasons why multiplatform multiplayer games are a herculean undertaking. Thankfully, our engineers had already solved this exact same problem years earlier when developing Minecraft Legends.

To fix the issue, significant portions of each console port's networking layer would need to be refactored to ensure players could enjoy the unique thrill of throwing your unconscious partner's body down a colorful playground slide leading to certain, excruciating death. These types of disruptions to timelines are always nerve wracking – especially in the tender, early days of a new partnership. But Secret Mode made it clear it was focused on delivering the best experience for all players rather than barreling forward at whatever cost. Both the PS5 and Xbox ports were rescheduled to ship closer to the Switch 2 version in 2026.

This actually had some real silver linings, too. Secret Mode wanted to eventually implement crossplay across all platforms alongside the work required to bring Escape the Backrooms to Xbox's Game Pass. Now, instead of doing a two-stage console launch, we could get 1.0 on PC and focus on a more robust, fully-featured console release. As luck would have it, that ended up syncing well with A24's Backrooms movie hitting theaters.

When Escape the Backrooms' 1.0 update finally arrived on Steam, it was surreal to watch the response. Concurrent players peaked at just over 48K – about three times higher than the previous record. Of the nearly 10K user reviews that rolled in after launch, around 93 percent of them were positive.

We continued working extremely closely with Secret Mode to track player feedback and squash high-priority bugs. At the same time, we now had our next hurdle on the horizon: Cosmetics.

The core feature of the Winter Wanderer update was a cosmetic system to allow players to choose between 11 different costumes for their Wanderer. This solved a fundamental problem: It was very difficult to distinguish other players since they all wore the same yellow hazmat suits.

In November, the team grew to include more skillsets and build momentum toward the console ports. This included a UI artist to implement the interfaces our design team were creating for the cosmetic system and two engineers to add velocity to the console ports and other backlog items. At the end of the year, we also slowly transitioned an engineer to a different project.

One of the obvious-yet-terrifying realities of co-development is the challenge of navigating the ebb and flow of staff across projects. It's extremely precise and stressful work to ensure that when one project ends, our staff have something else to migrate to. Projects almost never line up cleanly, and how you solve for those gaps makes all the difference.

We approach co-development differently from a lot of outfits. Our value is that we are developers who have (and continue to) ship our own games. We're familiar with every phase of development from indie to AAA. While two employees might share a job title, they each have their own unique talents, specializations, and creative passions.

And when you analyze and map people to projects they're uniquely suited for (instead of just treating them like interchangeable grunts on a manufacturing line), you can achieve more than being a mere service provider.

Case in point: December's Winter Wanderer update posed unique challenges because its core feature was player cosmetics. When building the team, we didn't have room for more than a single 3D artist. We knew that Escape the Backrooms gameplay involved its 40-plus levels, so having an artist tailored to that only made sense.

But the cosmetics update now required an artist capable of holistically working with character meshes, textures, and animations. If we had been careless in who we chose to fill that role, that sudden shift in focus would've caused a lot of issues. Fortunately, we had someone with the skills and adaptability to step outside their comfort zone.

This scrappy, get-it-done spirit has become the defining ethos of Project Minotaur. While working on some to-be-announced levels, our producer found herself doing sound foley work using plastic balls she purchased from a dollar store and her cellphone mic. And, as I already explained, working in a codebase you inherited without documentation encouraged our engineers to rethink how they might solve any given problem.

As the months ticked by, the team shipped the Chinese New Year update in February while concurrently tackling the console ports. To solve the issues I outline with networking, we implemented Epic Online Services which also gave us the framework to support full crossplay across all platforms.

But it was also important to keep multiplayer effortless, so we sidestepped requirements around additional account registrations or needing to juggle multiple friend lists and opted for a simple lobby code approach.

Incredibly, the stars aligned when A24 announced that Backrooms would hit theaters on May 29. Thanks to the team's hard work and our close collaboration with Secret Mode, we were able to navigate the complexities of implementing crossplay, Game Pass, and console certification to launch the PS5 and Xbox versions of Escape the Backrooms just one day earlier, May 28. When the Switch 2 version arrived on July 7, Secret Mode announced that over 4 million players had played Escape the Backrooms over the past month. It was also the most-downloaded game on PS5 across North American and Europe in June.

It would've been one hell of a high note to wind the project down on. Fortunately, Secret Mode agreed with us that we clearly had a good thing going. We signed a new contract to keep Blackbird Interactive involved for the foreseeable future while Secret Mode spins up their own internal teams to eventually work alongside us.

With console porting done, the team is evolving once again – and doubling in size, too. To meet player demand for more levels and content, we've added new level designers, artists, a senior producer, another QA tester, and more. We're ready and excited to tackle this next phase of Escape the Backrooms .

In writing this postmortem and talking with the team, I kept coming back to this dichotomy that Escape the Backrooms is now caught between. One of Fancy's enduring charms is how unafraid he is to throw himself under the bus when it comes to his lack of professional game development experience. But he's just a small part of a generational swell of new talent who are finding enormous success by moving fast and being unafraid to make mistakes.

It's a stark contrast to a more mature school of game development built on institutionalized rigor, process, and carefully-curated marketing. Of course, wiser developers know that dogmatic loyalty to either one can be a siren song that lures you toward rocky shoals.

In conversation with our president and chief creative officer, Rory McGuire, he sagely pointed out the fascinating parallels between Fancy and Kane Parsons, the 21-year-old director of Backrooms who first rose to fame for his Backrooms YouTube videos. "What's happening in Hollywood is also happening in games," Rory said. "And all of us, as developers, need to pay attention because the aesthetics and expectations of our audiences are changing. It's not a bad thing. It's perfectly normal. But you either need to adapt or become a niche and then hope there's a big enough audience there."

Rory also shared another nugget of wisdom that I'd like to cite here: What makes a good partnership isn't measured by how smoothly the project is going, but how partners respond when things go wrong. And, let's be real, this is game dev. Things will go wrong.

It's a lens that I've found invaluable when trying to tell this story, because it explains why we're so proud of our work on Escape the Backrooms . There have been challenges – and there will be more – but that spirit of persistence and gettin' it done suffuses the whole thing. From the relationship we have with Secret Mode, down to the Project Minotaur team working on a game that only exists because years ago some dude on the internet didn't think "I don't know how" was a good excuse not to try.