Ready Player One: Prologue

 Prologue: 0000

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We kick off the book with our protagonist, Wade, hitting us with the news of James Halliday’s death. It also is the first inkling of Wade’s unpleasantly obnoxious personality as he starts going on about how the world has much bigger problems than the death of, as he put it, “one of the wealthiest people of the world.” Ya know, the sort of thing you’d see out of some smug teenager trying to seem above it all and how he’s “concerned” about real problems while pretty much doing nothing but tweet about how those problems exist. Wades makes a point of referring to the viewing public as “the unwashed masses” which is rich coming from a kid living in one of the trailer park Jenga towers.

So, skipping a bit ahead to talk about the one bit of worldbuilding that is pretty neat for the series; the Stacks. See, in the world of RPO, poverty has gotten to such an extreme that a series of trailers have been constructed on top of each other, stacked together, as it were. It’s a strong visual, and does give a real sense of the world Wade lives in. It feels more realistically dystopian in a time when the boom of dystopian YA novels were a touch more fantastical. Like, I could see something like the Stacks being a thing. It’s one of the few credits I’ll give to Ernest Cline as a writer. It’s a shame that it’s touched on so little in the book.

We do get some real important details about Halliday; he died a bachelor and left no heirs. His last will and testament was a video will, dubbed Anorak’s Invitation. I do like the touch of setting the will to Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo. It’s a great little song and it actually feels fitting to the scene. If the rest of the book's references were this well-woven into the story, I’d probably not even bother with the blog.

We also get some real murky prose in terms of describing the extras in this video will’s presentation.

Halliday is at a high-school dance being held in a large gymnasium. He’s surrounded by teenagers whose clothing, hairstyles, and dance moves all indicate that the time period is the late 1980s. Halliday is dancing, too—something no one ever saw him do in real life. Grinning maniacally, he spins in rapid circles, swinging his arms and head in time with the song, flawlessly cycling through several signature ’80s dance moves.

The thing that drives me nuts is that the description just assumes you know just what ‘80s clothing, hairstyles and dance moves without any effort on Cline’s part. Along with that, it’s flavorless. I’m not confident in my own descriptive abilities as a writer, but the fact is that I could do a way better job of this. Describe the colors of the clothing, tell us what Wade thinks of the hairstyles. For a book that namedrops so much pop culture, the fact Ernest couldn’t even bother to name a single ‘80s dance move is baffling. The Running Man, The Cabbage Page, The Kid ‘n Play, The Worm, The Biz, hell, how about the friggin’ Moonwalk?! Ya know, the signature dance move of one of the biggest pop stars of the ‘80s?

Just like that, the credit I gave it for the use of Dead Man’s Party is lost as he can’t even follow it up with actual description work. We also get little footnotes about how the follow-up scene, Halliday presenting his will, is designed to evoke the film Heathers and I struggle to see the relevance that has beyond just Heathers being an 80s film. Unless Halliday is gonna declare how he loves his dead, gay self, this could’ve just been a simple presentation of Halliday reading out his will.

I’m nitpicking, really, this does kind of work to establish Halliday’s obsessiveness over the ‘80s, that he can’t even produce a video will for himself without making some sort of reference to the decade. Plus, it’s not like he can make reference to the video will from Brewster’s Millions since Horn made that for his sole living heir and Halliday didn’t have that.

Halliday lays out the conditions of his will; his estate, including controlling share of his company (Gregarious Systems Simulations or GSS) and a fortune of $240 billion, is in escrow until someone meets the condition to earn it. He tells us about the Atari 2600 game Adventure, the game which introduced that concept of easter eggs in gaming.

The game’s creator, Warren Robinett, had hidden his name in the game in a secret room accessible by a rare key, since programmers at the time weren’t credited for their work. It was done as a way to prevent them from being snatched up by competition and Robinett believes it also took away a bargaining chip from developers during negotiations. In fact, Activision was founded because many of Atari’s programmers left due to this practice.

It’s a strong conceit for a contest to claim a fortune, though there is a much better one that will get name-dropped later on. It’s mainly the one picked because Halliday thought it was really cool when he was young and wanted to recreate that experience within the OASIS.

Anyway, the basics of the easter egg hunt are as follows; there’s three keys to three gates, scattered throughout the virtual world of the OASIS. Go through all three gates, find the egg and you win. Thus begins Halliday’s Hunt, a years-long search for the fabled easter egg that would grant fortune and power to the one who locates it. With the hunt comes a renewed love of 80s pop culture, all in the name of obtaining the easter egg.

Now, the idea of a book steeped in ‘80s nostalgia wasn’t a bad idea in a vacuum. After all, nostalgia spikes like these happen all the time, usually an appreciation for works at least two or three decades previously. Nowadays, everyone’s doing looks back to the ‘90s and 2000s. However, the problem comes that the book itself is set not in a reasonable decade where VR technology is commercially available and 80s nostalgia is unreasonable. No, it’s set in the 2040s, a time where folks would most likely be nostalgic for media of the late 2000s and 2010s. It becomes harder to buy that in the six decades between then, that people honestly care unless it was for this contest. Sensibilities change, and often drastically, over time. Consider how often you hear people discuss how Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today. At some point in Wade’s time, people will probably have the same discussions about, I dunno, Django Unchained.

I dunno, maybe I’m just talking a lot of nonsense, but the major hook for the book is this sort of nostalgia bait and it’s hard to believe that the fish would bite. It makes all the characters feel like they only care because there’s money on the table and that the second someone wins, it’ll just fade away and be forgotten. It’s a bubble, really.

The other thing that comes about is the proliferation of the “gunters” which is short for “egg hunters.” Gunters are the community that formed around finding the easter egg that have pretty much combed the OASIS, sharing all the various findings and oddities in the hopes of finding hints. However, the whole of the search goes cold until Wade finds the first key, the copper key.

The prologue ends on Wade relaying his mission statement with this book, written in first-person and relayed like a sort of autobiographical account. He intends to cut through all the rumor-spinning and dramatization of his story and give us the truth of how he won Halliday’s Hunt.

Honestly, despite the shallow worldbuilding and the dodginess of the main concept, the prologue isn’t a bad start. I do get a feeling in the book that Halliday was an important figure and a strong sense of the stakes of this whole hunt, especially since it took five years for anyone to even clear its first hurdle. It makes the promise of Wade to give us the full story actually seem like it isn’t a threat.

However, it is a threat. It’s a threat that you’re gonna be stuck with Wade for the rest of this journey. Strap in, folks. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.