Ready Player One is set in the year 2045; the world has become an ugly place with widespread war, famine and general poverty. The world's oil supply has ended and the climate is wrecked. Like most people in the world, the protagonist of the story, Wade Watts spends hours on end plugged into the "OASIS", a virtual, massively-multiplayer simulation world where your avatar can live and play on hundreds of custom-built worlds while forgetting about the problems of the real world. Five years previously, the eccentric billionaire creator of OASIS, James Haliday, passed away leaving his entire fortune and controlling stake in Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS), the company responsible for maintaining the OASIS, to any user who could find his secret "easter egg" within the game's environment. To find the egg, users must find a series of keys, each unlocking a series of riddles and challenges revolving around the music, movies, videogames and Haliday's obsession with the 1980's, the decade in which he grew up. Wade is a "gunter" (slang for egg-hunter) who has dedicated most of his life to learning every obscure pop-culture reference, mastering every videogame and learning every line of dialogue in hundreds of movies from Haliday's childhood. By chance, Wade decodes the first riddle of the competition and is the first user to find the copper key, one of three keys required to find Haliday's easter egg. Wade is an instant online celebrity and is closely followed by other top gunters, Atr3mis, Aech, Shoto and Daito who also find the key. Seeking to win the prize for themselves, the mega-corporation Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a competitor to GSS, recruits thousands of users to find the egg first (avatars referred to as "sixers"), legally-signing over the egg to the company if found in exchange for a salary. Wade finds himself playing a dangerous game in both the virtual and real world after IOI agents hack the details of his home address and bomb his aunt's shanty-like home in the "stacks", hoping to kill him off as a competitor (Wade is safely tucked away in his secret hideout at the time). Teaming up with the other high-level gunters, Wade progressively unlocks each of the keys in a series of challenges that see Wade battle it out against an un-dead king in the video game Joust, recite the dialogue to "WarGames" and "Monte Python and the Holy Grail" and play a perfect game of Pacman (amongst others). After a giant showdown against an army of sixers attempting to block off the final key, Wade gains possession of the egg and wins the competition.
Ready Player One was a really fun read. I was a young child in the eighties so I really enjoyed the nostalgia. I liked the way in which each of the challenges and puzzles unfolded. I liked the interplay between life in the OASIS and life in the real world. I liked the cyberpunk aspects; the sinister corporation playing dirty only to be outsmarted at each turn by the underdog protagonist. I think the bit I really enjoyed the most was in the descriptions of Wade's life in the "stacks" (ad-hoc apartment blocks constructed by dumping caravans and trailer-homes on top of one another) and the contrast to his online escape in the OASIS from his hideout.
Overall I wouldn't say this was a great book, mainly because I don't think it will appeal to everyone. Personally I found all the eighties videogame, TV and movie nostalgia really entertaining. However I did feel at times like it was nostaliga for nostalgia's sake with big info-dumps about pop-culture obscurity that didn't really move the plot along or have a particular significance to the story. That said, the story does a good job of employing the excitement of the "hunt" as something that probably has more universal appeal and made this book a very easy and enjoyable read. I wouldn't rate it in the top of my list, but a very enjoyable read none the less.
