SCP Foundation


The SCP Foundation is a fictional organization featured in stories created by contributors on the SCP Wiki, a wiki-based collaborative writing project, launched in 2008. Within the project's shared universe, the SCP Foundation is a secret organization that is responsible for capturing, containing, and studying various paranormal, supernatural, and other mysterious phenomena, while also keeping their existence hidden from the rest of society.
The collaborative writing project includes elements of many genres such as horror, science fiction, and urban fantasy. The majority of works on the SCP Wiki consist of thousands of SCP files: mock confidential scientific reports that document various SCPs and associated containment procedures. The website also contains "Foundation Tales", short stories featuring various characters and settings in the SCP universe. The wiki's literary works have been praised for their ability to convey horror through a quasi-scientific and academic writing style, as well as for their high standards of quality.
The SCP universe has inspired numerous fan-made adaptations in varying forms of media, including literature, music, short films, and video games.

Overview

The fictional setting of the SCP universe revolves around the findings and activities of the SCP Foundation, an international non-governmental secret society consisting of a scientific research institution with a paramilitary intelligence agency to support their goals. The Foundation operates independently of any government, answering only to their own mysterious 13-member leadership body called the, also known as the Overseers. This organization is dedicated to protecting the world by capturing and containing various unexplained paranormal phenomena which display supernatural abilities or other extremely unusual properties that defy conventional scientific laws. They include living beings, objects, places, abstract concepts, and incomprehensible entities. If left uncontained, many of the more dangerous anomalies would pose a serious threat to human beings or even all life on Earth. All information regarding the existence of the Foundation and SCPs are strictly classified and withheld from the general public in order to prevent mass hysteria that would supposedly occur if they were leaked, and allow human civilization to continue functioning under a masquerade of "normalcy".
Whenever an anomaly is discovered, teams of Foundation agents are deployed to either collect and transport the object or entity to one of the organization's many secret facilities, or to contain it at its location of discovery if transportation is not possible. Civilian eyewitnesses are frequently interrogated and then dosed with amnestic drugs to erase their memories of anomalous events. At the Foundation's secret containment and research facilities, SCPs are locked in captivity by armed security guards, and studied by scientists to develop better containment methods for them. The Foundation's laboratory research projects frequently exploit disposable human test subjects acquired from around the world known as "D-class personnel", forcing them into performing slave labor and participating in experiments with potentially dangerous SCPs in order to avoid risking the safety of the Foundation's employees.
Apart from the Foundation itself, there are numerous rival organizations actively involved with the paranormal world. Examples include the, a terrorist splinter group of ex-Foundation defectors who capture and weaponize SCPs; the , a secret paramilitary agency of the United Nations which specializes in destroying supernatural threats instead of containing them; and the, a militant group which advocates for the rights of anomalous beings, resisting both the Foundation's and GOC's efforts to suppress paranormal activity worldwide. Other GOIs seek to exploit anomalies by producing or selling them for profit, or using them to serve their own religious, political, or ideological goals.

Examples of SCPs

  • is a mysterious, memory-erasing "anti-meme" anomaly that causes anyone who examines it to forget its existence, thus making its true nature unknown; its characteristics are indescribable except in terms of what it is.
  • is a staircase that appears to descend infinitely and inhibits any light within its space. It is inhabited by, a disembodied floating face without a mouth, nostrils, or pupils, which chases after anyone walking down the stairs.
  • is a tall thin humanoid creature with intense scopophobia, which causes it great psychological distress. The creature will hunt down and kill anyone who has seen its face, whether directly in person, or even by seeing images of its face from photos or video footage.
  • is a humanoid statue composed of rebar, concrete, and spray paint. It is immobile when directly observed, but it attacks people and breaks their neck when the line of sight with it is broken. It is extremely fast, to the point where it can move multiple meters when the observer blinks. SCP-173 is the first SCP ever written, and it inspired the rest of the SCP Wiki and its fictional universe. The entry was originally illustrated with a picture of an artwork by Izumi Katō, but this was removed due to copyright reasons.
  • is a coffee vending machine that can dispense anything that can exist in liquid form—including certain abstract concepts. Regardless of the physical or chemical properties of the substance chosen, the machine's polystyrene cups appear to suffer no damage from the substances dispensed into them.
  • is a toaster that can only be referred to in the first person.
  • is a gelatinous slime mold–like creature that smells similar to whatever is the most comforting smell to the person it makes contact with. It has a friendly personality and is known to induce positive emotions on contact with humans and other organisms; as such, it is employed as a tool by the SCP Foundation.
  • is a home that has windows covered in condensation; by writing in the condensation on the glass, it is possible to communicate with an extra-dimensional entity whose windows are likewise covered in condensation. This entity bears xenophobic enmity against humans, but does not know that the Foundation members are humans.
  • is a man who perceives all animals he sees as the actor Shia LaBeouf.
  • is a sentient pile of wood chip mulch, fabric scraps, and nails. It teleports into the lungs of individuals displaying aggressive behavior towards it, wearing formal attire or who are otherwise identified by it to be a threat. It was previously a benevolent chair that teleported to nearby individuals who needed to sit down, and was transformed into its current state after being destroyed in a woodchipper by the Global Occult Coalition.
  • is an abandoned IKEA store, with an interior containing a seemingly infinite, labyrinthine pocket dimension designated as. Prospective customers who have become trapped within the endless building make rudimentary fortifications to defend against the store's monstrous inhabitants: tall faceless humanoid creatures wearing IKEA employee uniforms named, which become violently aggressive towards humans when the lights are turned off at "night".

    History

The SCP Foundation originated in the "paranormal" /x/ forum of 4chan in June 2007, where the very first SCP file, SCP-173, was posted by an anonymous user, accompanied by an image of the sculpture "Untitled 2004" by Japanese artist Izumi Katō. Although displeased with the unlicensed use of his art, Katō allowed the use of the photo explicitly for the noncommercial purposes of the community. Though SCP-173 was initially a stand-alone short story, many additional SCP files were created shortly after; those new SCPs copied SCP-173's style and were set within the same fictional universe.
In July 2008, the SCP Wiki was transferred to its current Wikidot website after the wiki hosting service EditThis switched to a paid model. New Wikidot wikis, by default, made use of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license at the time. The SCP staff therefore "accidentally" adopted this license for SCP media. By 2009, a large number of articles had been written but the quality of those posts was often poor. A mass edit conducted from September to December of that year saw every article reviewed and a large number "decommissioned". A repository of the removed articles is preserved at SCP Classic. The development of evaluation processes, including the sharing of ideas and constructive criticism, has since allowed the community to maintain a high quality level for new articles.
The community continued to grow and opened branches in additional languages from the early 2010s. In particular, a surge of new members arrived in 2012 after the launch of SCP – Containment Breach. The original SCP-173 text was released into the creative commons by its author explicitly in 2013, in an effort to address the uncertain license status of some earlier material. This debate over licensing led to a dispute between the English and Russian language branches in 2017, which briefly shut down the Russian version.
In 2022, an article in American Journalism suggested that the SCP Foundation may have become the largest collaborative writing project in history.

Writing style

On the SCP Wiki, the majority of works are stand-alone articles detailing the "Special Containment Procedures" of a given SCP object. In a typical article, an SCP object is assigned a unique identification number and a "containment class" based on the difficulty of containing it. The documentation then outlines proper containment procedures and safety measures, and a description of the SCP object in question. Addenda may also be attached to the document. The reports are written in a scientific tone and often censor words with black redaction bars and "data expunged" markings, to give the in-universe impression of sensitive information not to be disclosed to lesser-privileged Foundation staff. articles exist for over 9,800 SCP objects; new articles are written and published frequently by contributors.
The SCP Wiki also contains over 6,300 short stories referred to as "Foundation Tales". The stories are set within the larger SCP universe, and often focus on the exploits of various Foundation staff members, SCP entities, and objects, among other recurring characters and settings. Gregory Burkart, writing for Blumhouse Productions, noted that some of the Foundation Tales had a dark and bleak tone, while others were "surprisingly light-hearted".
The SCP universe has neither a central canon nor the ability to establish one due to its community-oriented nature, but stories on the wiki are often linked together to create larger narratives. Contributors have the ability to create "canons", which are clusters of SCPs and Foundation Tales with similar locations, characters, or central plots; many of these canons have hub pages that explain their basic concept and provide information such as timelines and character lists.
The genres of the SCP Wiki have variously been described as science fiction, urban fantasy, horror, and creepypasta.