It’s called Floor796, and the first time you end up inside it, it’s hard to believe a place like this actually exists. It’s an ever-expanding animated web project created by Pavel Sannikau, a self-taught programmer from Belarus.
Floor796 depicts everyday life on the 796th floor of a massive fictional space station, entirely rendered in pixel art, stuck in a loop that widens room by room. The site lives at floor796.com, and it’s one of those places where you know when you go in, but not when you’ll come out.
The name isn’t random. 7, 9 and 6 are the positions in the English alphabet of the letters G, I, F: this project is, at its core, a mega gif, and all the action unfolds on the GIF floor of the space station. A small, precise detail that already says a lot about who built it.
The animation runs on a 60-frame loop that repeats every five seconds. Inside there are pools, hospitals, kitchens, gyms, labs, canteens, black holes, phone booths, and above all thousands of characters pulled from films, series, video games, anime and memes of the last forty years. Picture all the pop culture of the last few decades condensed into one giant gif and you’ve got Floor796.
Beyond the fun of hunting down every possible character, from every Batman to Gandalf, from the Teletubbies to the leads of The Last of Us, you can also find interactive elements like phones for calling other floors or musical bits.
What makes this project even more fascinating is that it’s built entirely by one person.
Pavel Sannikau isn’t a professional artist: he’s a total self-taught autodidact, a die-hard fan of all things pop culture, who started drawing short animated clips as a hobby back in 2012. He then spent nearly five years fully devoted to software development, setting aside any graphic ambitions, until he had the idea to combine the two into something completely new. A project that wasn’t a video game, wasn’t a film, wasn’t a portfolio: something that would grow by accumulation, room after room, never declaring itself finished.
Floor796 launched in 2018. Sannikau didn’t draw anything in the first year: he spent it building the tools. He developed a proprietary animation editor from scratch, tailored to the project’s specific style. He built a rendering engine and the entire site. Only after that did he actually start drawing. The first block took him about 8 months to make; today, he admits he can put one together in roughly a month and a half.
The numbers behind the project are as surreal as the project itself. Over 6,000 layers. More than 10,000 estimated hours of work for the first 50 blocks. A pace of 3-5 hours a day on weekdays, 8-12 hours on weekends. All of it done on Floor796 in his spare time only.
Floor796 is, among other things, a fairly powerful reminder of what one person can do with a precise idea and enough patience to carry it through. The web doesn’t usually produce things like this. When it does, it’s worth watching, and maybe even joining in: Pavel Sannikau welcomes suggestions on which characters to add to upcoming blocks. The address is floor796.com, and the 796th floor still has plenty of empty rooms.
