Book 33 – Ready Player One
Fun! So much fun! A wealthy, virtual reality video game inventor leaves his entire, mind-bogglingly large fortune to whomever is first to solve a 3-stage puzzle that he embeds in said video game. Years go by before the first clue is found and the dominoes start to fall, and through it all we are treated to a nostalgic look back at 80’s movie and gaming culture. Pieces of the puzzle involve elements from movies and TV such as War Games and Family Ties, and from arcade and role-playing games such as Pac Man, Dungeons and Dragons, and Adventure (ah, Adventure! I used to play this on a dial-up Honeywell Mainframe that charged us by the minute, so my father limited my sister and I to 10 minutes of playing time per day – ten minutes!! – and it is my fondest memory of 80’s “video” games. But I digress). Ernest Cline is obviously an 80’s gamer, and he has turned his passion into a wonderful story that I enjoyed immensely.
In a peculiar coincidence, I finished the book just before my sister-in-law and I took our kids to the local Barcadia, a blend of bar and video arcade featuring local beer and refurbished 80’s arcade games that can still be played for a quarter. Or maybe it’s not a coincidence at all. I am more inclined to attribute this kind of thing to confirmation bias than a random alignment of related events. In fact, had this been a week earlier, I would have said it was coincident with me installing a new Zork game emulator App on my iPhone 6 (how fun it is to type “go west” into a smartphone and have the app display “you are in a twisty maze with passages in all directions” in courier font). 80’s nostalgia does seem to be at an all-time high right now. Perhaps it’s because last October was the date of Marty McFly’s arrival in the future, which lead to a resurgence of Back to the Future popularity. Or the fact that Star Wars was just released. Or that Pokemon is back. Whatever the case, Ready Player One fits right in. It’s also no surprise that a movie is already in the making. I certainly expect to be lined up with a lot of other 50-year-olds.
Rating: Buy it. If you are a lover of arcade or role playing games, you will really enjoy it, and you are going to want to read it again before you line up with me for the movie.
