Posted By Iain McNally on February 28, 2013

How do you write a virtual reality adventure set in the relatively far flung future and yet still include references to all your favorite TV, film, and videogame icons of the 70 and 80’s without it feeling forced? In Ready Player One, Ernest Cline resolves this problem by focusing on an online treasure hunt, set by the inventor of this future’s virtual reality, for an unbelievable fortune, and all the clues are based around his obsession with the pop culture of his youth. Naturally, this leads the world to embrace 80’s culture once again.

James Halliday, creator of the OASIS, a VR replacement for the internet, dies leaving the ownership of the OASIS and his entire fortune of over 240 billion dollars to the person who can decode the clues he left behind in the OASIS and find the ultimate “Easter Egg”, a secret left behind in code by the programmer. To get to this egg, players need to find a series of three keys and defeat the challenges hidden behind the matching gates. As the reward is so vast, the entire world engages in “The Hunt” and 80’s culture undergoes a massive resurgence, once again becoming the dominant culture of the future. This allows Cline to have his cake and eat it, with a fully realized VR world as well as casual references to everything from the Atari 2600, the movie War Games starring Matthew Broderick, Dungeons & Dragons, the music of Rush, and much, much more. The book is positively littered with references to 80’s pop culture and videogame lore.

We are introduced to this world through the eyes of teenager Wade “Parzival” Watts, Parzival being his online avatar’s name, an Egg hunter or “Gunter“, who spends all the time not spent at virtual school, obsessively boning up on 80’s culture. Playing Pac-man, watching Family Ties, and studying Halliday’s biography for anything that could help him find the egg.

He desperately needs to find the egg to save himself from his bleak life with his mean aunt Alice in “The Stacks”, a trailer park in Oklahoma where, due to the population explosion and poverty, decrepit mobile homes are stacked on top of each other to save space. The OASIS is also an escape for the orphaned Wade as the world of Ready Player One is bleak. The world’s resources are almost totally exhausted; population expansion, poverty and unemployment are rife, and most people spend their lives live on-line, trying to escape the reality of their world.

Thanks to the peculiarities of this online world, Wade’s quest to find the egg will not be as easy as guessing at clues and then using Google/Bing/Altavista to find out if he’s right. While the OASIS has replaced the internet and all the media from previous generations is available there, it does have a physical aspect too, with a dimension of distance as well as some rules that can vary from location to location.

The OASIS is made up of planets, many themed after locations from TV shows, movies, and prog rock theme albums, some coded as original creations, and some based upon real world places. Getting from one world to another costs, either through teleporter fees, or if you have the virtual currency to spare, through the purchase of one’s own personal spaceship. Cline has a lot of fun in the book referencing his own favorite star ships when this comes up later in the book.

Not being flush with cash, Wade initially has difficulty getting around; school is the only reason he even has the equipment needed to log on. Once he finds the first key (and it’s virtual; cash reward) things get a little easier. This is not a spoiler by the way, it’s established in the first chapter that he finds the first key. From that point onwards he’ll need to deal with other gunters.

Many planets in the OASIS allow unrestricted player-vs-player combat so if Wade is killed on one, he’ll lose his entire inventory, including the skills, virtual cash, and items that got him this far. Again Cline turns the standard MMORPG trope of PvP combat into something a little more fun, as well as threatening. He creates some fun mash-ups as players in the OASIS can use magical skills and items on some planets, technological ones elsewhere, and some planets allow both, leading to some interesting encounters.

Wade may be the first player to find the copper key and solve the copper gate ‘s challenge, but semi-friendly competition soon arrives in the form of his online friend Aaech, online celebrity Art3mis, and Japanese gunters Daito and Shoto. The real life fame of being the first, doesn’t intrude too much on the hunt, as the OASIS protects the anonymity of all its users, which makes it easier for Cline to concentrate on the online world.

Less welcome competition arrives in the form of Nathan Sorrento and his army of faceless sell-out gunters, who work for Innovative Online Industries, a corporation who wants to take the OASIS, monetize the hell out of it, and remove the online anonymity system that it provides.  Due to their numbers and resources the “sixers” as they are known are a formidable foe.

So begins a race for the egg, told totally from Wade’s perspective, and spending as little time as possible in the world outside the OASIS.

Cline’s debut novel is an enjoyable nerd-reference filled adventure, flirting at times with some serious themes such as who can you really trust online and our future after peak oil, but never really lets them distract from the main reference-filled VR adventure.  The constant references will draw most readers (of a certain age) in, and most are explained in context, so it shouldn’t be off putting for readers who have no idea what Firefly or Ultraman are. Personally, I found the references to early videogame development intriguing and there weren’t any references that I had to look elsewhere to understand.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was born in 1978 and will (hopefully) be in my 60’s by the time the events described in the book take place, I owned an Atari 2600, and many gaming consoles since and seem to share most of the same interest of Cline so I’m pretty much the target demographic for this novel, although I never really listened to Rush. Cline was also the screenwriter on the film Fanboys, the 2009 film about 4 friends who try to sneak their terminally ill friend into Skywalker ranch to The Phantom Menace in 1999, which really speaks to his nerd-cred.

If any of the above sounds abysmal to you, then maybe this isn’t the book for you.

If you are still interested Cline writes in a solid, unfussy style with a brisk pace that easily leads to the label “page turner”. While the tale is told wholly from Wade’s point of view, the race to the top of the online leader board of the gunters progress and some genuine threats keep the plot moving along at a brisk pace.

A spot of corporate espionage in the final third comes off as a bit too easy, despite harsh consequences for failure and the final battle also seems a little rushed. Cline also creates some more personal worries for Wade regarding the gender, age, physical appearance, and overall identity of his friends, whom he has only ever met online, but these are dismissed with little controversy. This doesn’t hurt the book overall but it would have added more to the story if some of Wade’s companions were radically different than they seemed online.

Would you like to know more: If you enjoyed Ready Player One and wouldn’t mind engaging in an egg hunt yourself, Cline set up his own Easter egg hunt in mid-2012 with a clue hidden in the book and online game challenges to be bested, in order to win a DeLorean DMC-12, yes, the very car Doc Brown turned into a time machine in Back to the Future. The competition is over now; however the related websites and online games that were part of the hunt are still available and can be found once you discover the first clue: a URL hidden in the book.

Good hunting!

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Categories: Bookworms
Tags: Atari, Back to the Future, Delorean, Dungeons & Dragons, Ernest Cline, Ernie cline, Family Ties, Fanboys, Firefly, Matthew broderick, ready player one, Rush, Ultraman, War Games