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Roblox Thing

Youtube.com is an online video sharing platform founded in 2005. It was created to more easily share footage of important events, such as Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, or the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Roblox is an online game platform/game creation system released to the public in 2006. It was created to exploit child workers for unpaid labor. Of course, these explanations are redundant. Not a soul on the internet doesn’t know what YouTube is, and Roblox’s ubiquity means that even if you aren’t familiar with the game itself, you’ll likely have encountered it in some manner. Memes, soundclips blasted intermittently throughout unrelated videos, MVs recreated with in-game avatars; Roblox iconography creeps into the collective consciousness like a digital poltergeist. This is how I was introduced to the platform. Despite being in the prime demographic for Roblox’s classic era— a baby gamer in the aughts of Neopets and Wizards101 persuasion— I had somehow avoided Roblox mania (probably due to a lack of friends who were already familiar with it). I was, however, also a big fan of creepypasta and horror, which would unknowingly send me down the path to eventually collide with Roblox in a different context. I wouldn’t become familiar with Roblox as a player, but as audience to the modern, enigmatic horror series that use the platform as their medium.

For this essay, I will focus largely on unfiction/ARG video series, but let it be known that is only a fraction of the horror content utilizing the platform. Roblox, after all, is a platform for creating games, so horror games published on Roblox are their own thriving subsect. The main reasons I don’t focus on them are for scope, and my own relative lack of familiarity. Unfiction Roblox series tend to be more constrained in structure (not to say that Roblox horror games lack recurring tropes and structures) because they lean into the very particular tropes of 2000s-era Roblox nostalgia. They tend to utilize a framing device common to digital horror: fake archive channels containing “reuploads” of nonexistent users’ videos, usually circa 2005-2015. It really is an experience to sit in for something you know you aren’t in the audience for at all, even more when you’re hit with the palpable wave of nostalgia the work is trying to evoke anyway. As multiple Youtube comments have joked, it’s almost a shame that these channels inevitably denigrate into unfathomable horrors— these videos, at their most well-made, are shots of distilled 2008 internet directly to the bloodstream. Lovingly shitty Windows Movie Maker slideshows, skit videos with stolen audio pantomimed by decked out avatars of the channel owner and their friends, wacky gameplay compilations of players goofing off and blowing themselves up. It wouldn’t be hard to find channels just like these on YouTube at the time, before Web 3.0 and the decentralization of the web, the oft-fabled internet “Wild West”. These are greener pastures that we look back longingly towards, even though genuine danger was just as present as imagination and wonder.

Screenshot from RecallAHollowHeart of a Roblox recreation of the classic Waffles skit.
Source: RecallAHollowHeart, Roblox - Waffles

While not exclusive to Roblox horror by any means, this kayfabe is arguably a cornerstone of digital horror as a whole, the sheer passion these channels tend to put into the buildup make them especially effective. After all, the main pathos of these stories is the construction of a convincing, living soul behind the screen; the horror that results wouldn’t hit nearly as much otherwise. Speaking of horror— in a paradoxical statement for an essay espousing the strength of this genre, I don’t find these Roblox series particularly frightening. Most digital horror doesn’t get me too viscerally, especially after the first time watching through, but I have never found this to be a deterrent. What one gets out of these stories, more than traditional terrifying imagery or scares, tends to lean more towards creeping, slow-burn, grounded sort of horror. “Grounded” may seem rich, since many of the channels’ antagonists are explicitly supernatural, comically so considering what they’re haunting (why are these otherworldly beings so concerned with ruining the lives of 14-year-olds on Roblox?) But then again, not all of them are; brandon works, one of the most well-known of the genre out there, has no hint of the supernatural at all. Nonetheless, the protagonist is haunted. The question, why are these otherworldly beings so concerned with ruining the lives of 14-year-olds on Roblox, deserves to be dissected a little more— why kids? Why Roblox? Why are these children ceaselessly haunted, tormented?

Interlude: A Brief Excerpt From My Friend Who Actually Played Roblox

It felt incorrect to do a writeup about a game that I have no personal experience with and therefore no business talking about, so I asked my dear friend (kardboredkave on neocities) about their time on the platform. Here’s what they have to say:

“My first introduction to Roblox was around 2012, because of a classmate I talked to. It was during the transition period for Roblox. I just missed out on the early 2000s era, but some elements, like the big ass cursor with the green circle to indicate where you walked, still persisted. I don’t have much nostalgia for specific eras of Roblox, but I definitely get why a lot of series take place during this time. Way too many games these days are clones of other games and/or filled with in-game advertisements to spend, spend, spend.

I had a couple of years of playing online social games geared for kids under my belt (Club Penguin, ToonTown, Wizard101, and even weird Club Penguin copies), so I was aware of how these sites operated. All I knew was they wanted my parent’s money! I felt like I already knew a lot, because this time I wouldn’t put my real name as my username. I’d be: kuku661.

I could get these shiny clothes and exclusive access to games, but I had no real incentive to. You had 10 tix per day, and you used to be able to exchange something like 100 tix for 1 robux. And I was patient enough to save up for clothes I wanted. (Basically a dog hat and suits. It’s almost hilarious in hindsight how I performed gender online.)

And for the most part, my avatar didn’t matter to me, because I played a lot of roleplaying games, not to roleplay mind you. I could be anything, but mostly I just ignored what was being said in chat and walked around as whatever would get me the least amount of attention. Whether it was in high school or a castle or delivering pizzas, I just entered looking at all the stuff like it was a museum. A really blocky and poorly rendered museum.

I sometimes engaged with other players. The majority of my experience with Warrior Cats was scrapped together by animations and Roblox roleplays. I even reenacted a garbled version of the first book, where I was playing as Firepaw to someone else’s Scourge. Another time, I was in a Star Wars roleplay (despite the fact I’ve never watched a single movie) and I was a force ghost and someone tried to kill me. I told them I was a ghost so their light saber wouldn’t touch me and they accused me of godmoding. I would’ve been really indignant in chat if it weren’t for the fact my laptop overheated and crashed my game. (Even back then, the game was poorly optimized.) My friend’s favorite was “Sword Fighting Tournament”, where basically whoever bought the most expensive sword wiped the entire lobby. I think you could still lose even if you bought the “Illumina”, but that spoke more to your skill then. I was not the absolute worst at the game but I definitely was terrible. 2 random people on the server would fight, though sometimes there’d be team matches.

I watched Roblox videos on youtube. Mostly XiaoXiaoMan, who made an Angry Video Game Nerd inspired series called “Raging Robloxian Reviewer”. But he also made a series called God of War, though I couldn’t tell you much of the details. I think a lot of Roblox horror videos definitely evoke the time period well.

Although one particular Roblox video has stayed in my mind. A lot of people complained about online daters, ODers for short, and I was not an exception. I wish I could tell you the title but you’re gonna have to just read my terrible recollection. Basically it was a comedic video about the dangers of ODing, with two versions. The dialogue was written in an sHiTty l0l ranDUM kind of way with MS Paint art for everything outside Roblox sections. First the guy meets this girl in the game and says she’s hot and the girl says they should meet IRL. And then the kid goes up to meet the girl and she turns out to be a weird old guy. I remember watching the second one where… well you probably can expect the punchline of that era. (Seriously, what was up with the whole pedobear thing?)

I wanna describe two specific games that really kept me playing.

One was a boss battle gauntlet where everyone in the server fought the entire Greek pantheon. The game probably looked terrible and most of the gameplay was just spam clicking and dodging occasionally. But the (definitely stolen) music made me feel really fucking cool and I think part of what kept me playing Roblox was how different each experience was and my mind filled in the blanks (cause I didn’t know what better looked like).

The other was the time I actually made some online friends. I think the game was called Zombie Tower and the whole premise was fighting to the top of this tower. I’m by no means good at shooting games but I enjoyed the simplistic goal and visual progression. I got frustrated that I could never make it to the top, because people kept leaving and I was overwhelmed by zombies. But on one fateful evening, it was just me and two other users, whose names are lost to time, shooting our way through the horde (that was just a normal model painted green) and we made it to the top. It was a momentous occasion that we agreed to make a group together! The icon of the group was a screenshot of our characters at the grey tower, staring at nothing.

They made me a general!

Oh yeah, groups existed. I remember I wanted to join the biggest “military” group in Roblox, the Vortex Clan for some reason. But I quit that group to join this one.

I forgot the password to kuku661 and came back to Roblox around 2017. There’s still some fun stuff I definitely wouldn’t play alone nowadays. It’s like a worse VRChat and every other game."

Roblox is a weird beast. It’s definitely identifiable as playable, but it’s not a game in itself. It’s a puzzle/platformer, sometimes. It can be a shooter, depending on your selection. Most of all, Roblox levies social currency, a powerful incentive that’s kept it chugging for nearly two decades. In my forays into similar digital horror series utilizing Minecraft— a game I ironically do have childhood memories and potential nostalgia for— I could never take it seriously because whatever threat was presented could never affect much but the game itself. No matter how scary the monster or how much it could bend the game files to its will, the impact of its torment never mattered much outside of... not being able to play Minecraft anymore. Roblox series seem like they would have the same issues, but the important difference is that in nearly all the channels presented, Roblox is the epicenter of the protagonist’s friend circle. The presence of a malignant figure doesn’t just mean being cut off from a video game, it means being separated from the only friends they have, online friends that they often have no ability to visit in real life. This is a true, deep fear for a lot of people who’ve brought themselves up on the internet, including me. I’ve sent myself down anxiety spirals imagining a world where that fragile connection is shattered, where the network we take for granted goes down irreparably, and I am unable to ever contact the sweet, beautiful people who have kept me company over the years again. With this framing, it is no wonder that even as conditions deteriorate, the protagonists of these series stubbornly cling onto their outlet. It’s just something in a video game, after all— would you let that get in the way of your only connection to the people you love?

Screenshot from brandon works of the player Ozolog1 facing an NPC model of his friend Brandon while exploring Brandon's place. Overlaid caption reads: 'Hi again brandon.. If only you knew how many times you just got me killed. :P
Source: brandon works, "My House Place" Version 3

The horror is ignored until it becomes inescapable. In very few series do the protagonists ever find a legitimate way of combating what is happening to them— they switch computers, reinstall programs, confer with other, just as hapless, 14-year-olds— nothing works, predictably. We, the viewers, never get into a horror story really expecting that the protagonists will make it out alive. Yet we keep screaming our grief at the inevitable in the comments and our continued attendance. Maybe this time they’ll find their way out. Maybe this time there will be a way out. But more than likely, there won’t be. There’s something compelling about that too. Monsters aside, there’s nothing more realistic than being a child and having no power over what happens to you, only able to grit your teeth and hope the next day brings something better. Childhood is a time of great wonder but terrible helplessness, for none more so than the lonely, socially-awkward, undiagnosed and closeted kids of the internet. The corrosion of Roblox to a malignant force reflects how the escape the online world provides can flip on its head and become its own source of suffering.

The antagonists of these stories are often singular, alien or eldritch in nature, and pull from some sort of psychological well to torment our protagonists. They bring to mind villains of creepypasta such as Slenderman— I have had the thought more than once that these series’ approach reminds me a lot of Marble Hornets— enigmatic, lurking at the edges, all-powerful yet choosing to toy with their prey. While their influence is far-reaching, they are rarely the only thing the protagonist has to worry about; their effects are compounded by abusive family, toxic friends, general isolation, all the things that already make a young person’s life hell. Could it be that their woes would cease if they just stopped playing? But that’ll never happen. Not just for obvious narrative reasons, but because the seed of despair often originates from themselves. The protagonist of IHasAFaceLULZ tries to branch out into other forms of content after continually encountering a mysterious stalker, but the other games are corrupted. No one’s watching this non-Roblox shit anyway, so why bother? The return to the haunted game becomes a sort of addictive self-harm. Innocent posting gives way to feverish documentation, endless, compulsive recording, constant exposure of these kids’ deepest traumas and personal information. They post their paranormal encounters with the hopes of finding answers or solace, but all the audience can interface with is their suffering.

Screenshot from IHasAFaceLULZ of the protagonist FaceLULZ and their friend Bone messaging on a distorted chat site.
Source: IHasAFaceLULZ, .Decline

There’s a darker undertone to the antagonists of Roblox unfiction, even deeper than the personal horrors presented to the protagonists, which extends to the meta framing of the medium. YouTube and Roblox are pretty well-known cesspools of child exploitation on their own— both heralds of the consumer-targeted, hyper-sanitized capitalism that targets children as much as they claim to protect them. Through that lens you could read these series as twisted commentaries of a common YouTube feedback loop: young creators at first using the platform as an outlet for fun and creativity, only to have that twisted due to looming, predatory benefactors broadcasting their physical and mental torment. They are unable to assuage their suffering, but also unable to let go. This is their livelihood, their source of social interaction, and— from their vantage point, unable to see their own roles in a horror narrative— they believe the attention they’re getting is only for their Roblox content, even the traumatizing, abominable stuff. What is there to do but keep recording? At least then there’s proof that something happened to them. No one is coming to help. It’s an active plot point in many of these series that Roblox’s moderation team is useless. If these kids could put any legitimate faith in the adults whose job is to keep them safe, they would have done so already. vibingleaf’s The Whistle Occurrence centers around an elusive AI that induces “sudden convulsions, loss of consciousness, and potential injury”, particularly impacting young children— it was originally created as a security tool. This is not far removed from reality; in a 2025 interview concerning child safety on Roblox, CEO David Baszucki said their next step to combat predation is rolling out AI-powered facial scanning for age verification, stating, “we think of [predators on Roblox] not necessarily just as a problem but an opportunity.” In a separate interview, he talked of the potential of opening up the platform to online dating.

It’s rare to find a Roblox unfiction series with a definitive ending. Granted, that’s because most of them are still in-progress, but it’s hard to tell when hiatuses are simply due to long production times, or because creators give up on their projects for one reason or another. Roblox itself is an unstable medium to tell these stories due to its volatile moderation— I watched one series to its most recent upload, only for a post just a day later to inform me that it was going on indefinite hiatus because their account had been banned. It’s ironic that a series so deliberately displaced in time is still at the whims of the modern administration. This hazard of the genre is part of the unspoken contract one makes when they start watching any long-term internet project. On the other hand, when there is an ending, it is never definitively the end, necessarily. brandon works broke its silence almost two years after its conclusion to post an in-universe Halloween special, an innocuous video that serves, with the wider context of the channel, as a wordless, chilling eulogy. That is the beauty of this story format— few thrills in fiction compare to being subscribed to a long-dormant channel and seeing a notification long after you’ve forgotten about it. The narratives contained may have fixed ends, but the channel remains long after they conclude, mausoleums to the protagonists’ doomed journeys. The chassis left behind are evocative of the landscape of the internet as a whole, a landfill of abandoned accounts and digital footprints. You tend to think you’re being a lot more careful than you are online. In truth, you leave behind so much of yourself without even thinking— blog posts and old art and audio clips and videos— that can be carbon-dated to the exact time and place you were in your life. It’s embarrassing and uncanny to realize that the entire time, your bumbling steps through the world were not only readily documented, but broadcasted for an untold number of people to see. The details about yourself will always be more than you mean to give, and they will never give a full picture to whoever finds them. Such is the unspoken contract of existing online, which we sign too young to fully understand. These unfiction archives stand as such portraits of their child protagonists— their innocent play, their sometimes baffling actions. One might imagine if they were make it through their trials, slim as the chances might be, that years down the line they might look back and think, “God, what the fuck was I doing when I was 14?” Horror protagonists don’t exist past the endings of their stories, but I cannot help but dream. After all, the main pathos of these stories is the construction of a convincing, living soul behind the screen. Around 40% of Roblox players are under 13 years old. There will always be a call to give the children of the internet a voice, and their horrors a place to nest.

Miscellaneous works that inspired this essay in no particular order: