Are you ready player one?

Last week I had the opportunity to see the OASIS experience in Atlanta. The experience, partnered with Hot Topic, is a limited-time only traveling experience that will appear in 7 key markets leading up to the release of Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One on March 29. 

Based on the book by Ernest Cline, the ambitious film will no doubt have a lot of key scenes inside the OASIS, where individuals of the future go online to escape bitter reality. But the OASIS experience I visited is less virtual reality and more pop-up Hot Topic shop. Not that I’m complaining. I blew my budget and bought a women’s fitted shirt in my size that I’d already seen online. It’s made of the softest material, and I can’t wait to wear it when I see the film. It also saved me a trip to the mall or having to buy online. They also had a set of 3 keys, which the characters use to progress through the challenges in the OASIS. Some limited edition items like enamel pins were also available.

I was also able to see the trailer on a large screen (taller than me, though honestly that’s not saying much). Still, it was immersive and I felt excited all over again at the prospect of a new Spielberg movie. The walls were covered in the new marketing posters that blend characters of Ready Player One with pop-culture iconic posters of the past: Labyrinth, The Lost Boys, Goonies, and more. I also received a digital version of The Goonies when I made my purchase.

And early reviews are starting to come in for the film and appear to be overall positive, so I’m even more thrilled. It’s been a while since Spielberg has done a sci-fi film, and this one seems to be right up his alley. I’m sure he spared no expense bringing Cline’s story to the big screen. 

If you have a chance and the OASIS experience comes your way, be sure to check it out. Everyone involved is so enthusiastic, and there are a lot of fun t-shirt designs and Funko Pops to choose from if you want your Ready Player One merchandise ahead of seeing the film.

And go see the film!! It’s nostalgia. It’s Spielberg. Enough said. 

I thought it would be a neat idea to start a book club for readers of Big Shiny Robot, and what better book to start with than “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline? Okay, don’t answer that. It’s rhetorical. 

But I thought since the movie will be released in March (the 29th, to be exact which coincidentally is Ernest Cline’s birthday), and it’s an adaptation from my favorite director Steven Spielberg, then it only made sense to choose it. I’ve already read it in my local geek book club, but I enjoyed it so much it’s worth revisiting. 

Here’s the synopsis from Amazon:

At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed.

It’s the year 2045, and the real world is an ugly place. 

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. 

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.   

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape. 
 
A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?

Cline is no stranger to Hollywood, having worked on the script for the Kyle Newman-helmed film “Fanboys.”  He also drives a car called ECTO88 that’s a hybrid of vehicles from “Back to the Future,” “Ghostbusters,” “Knight Rider,” and “Buckaroo Banzai.” So he’s certainly a fanboy and a child of the 80’s, which is why “Ready Player One” reads like a love letter to 80’s pop culture nostalgia. 

So if you want to join us get to reading! The book is available on Kindle and other formats, and my app tells me it should take about 4 hours to read. And if you want to join us I’ll be hosting a twitter chat on March 1 at 9:00 pm EST. #BSRbookclub. 

Hope to see you there! 

‘Armada (7 out of 10), Written by Ernest Cline. Crown Publishing. Available 07/14/15′

I don’t want to geek out here, but let me just say that I loved ‘The Last Starfighter’ when I was a kid. I was youngin when it came out, and the video game craze was in full swing. Me and all of my friends wished we could find a game so we could also be recruited to fight battles in space with real (or at least computer-generated) lasers.

The biggest problems with “The Last Starfighter” come as a result of the films era rather than from script flaws. Sure, the effects were rudimentary. Sure the acting was cheesy. Sure the story was corny. And sure, the plot was utterly preposterous. But like I said, for a kid who spent too much time at the video arcades, it was pure cinematic gold. It embraced its derivativeness and ran with it to deliver a fun space opera. A quality it shares with Ernest Clines’ novel. ‘Armada.’

No review of ‘Armada’ would be complete without a mention of Ernest Cline’s debut novel, ‘Ready Player One’ which this is the long-awaited follow-up. Both books share lots in common, mainly a love of video games and all things 80’s. Like RPO, ‘Armada’ has as its hero a teenage boy whose obsession with gaming proves more valuable than expected; in this case, it’s because aliens are about to invade earth, and the highest-scoring players of a video game named Armada – including our protagonist, Zack – are being recruited to fight them.

As with RPO, ‘Armada’ wears its influences for all to see. One of the things I enjoy about Clines writing is that almost feeling of precognition that you’ll appreciate and understand if you are familiar with pop culture references and the movies and games he uses. The similarities with ‘Ender’s Game’ especially aren’t hidden away from the reader. Cline acknowledges it all the way through, and even if – like me – you reach the reveal towards the middle of the book and assume you know where the story is going, you probably don’t. It flirts with grand questions that affect all mankind while also paying tribute to the small things that define us as individuals. Fans won’t be let down, there are some twists and turns along the way made the narrative move along in an otherwise linear story with a discernible climax and ending neatly tied up in a bow, but not in the way you’d predict. The pacing was so quick that I felt compelled to read on. Most of the action of the book takes place in 24 hours.

The film rights to Armada were sold a full three years (!) before its publication, reportedly on the basis of a 20-page proposal, and it’s easy to believe the whole thing was written with a movie in mind. Absolutely nothing about it is going to need to be changed – the set-pieces, the dialogue, the meticulously detailed weapons and spaceships, even the way the characters’ body language and facial expressions are described; it’s so much like a sci-fi/action blockbuster, so easy to picture, that it could be a novelization of an existing film. Indeed, I think many of these things would/will be better on screen than on the page. Once it got going, this was what carried it along. I imagined it as being very ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’, sans raccoon.

I have heard a bunch of negative chatter about ‘Armada’ being wish fulfillment. Of course it is, but it’s such harmless wish fulfillment. I could no more hate this book than I could hate an enthusiastic puppy. I wanted escapism, and it delivered escapism. A slice of heaven for geeks & gamers alike.

-Dagobot



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