- Hi, I'm Ernest Cline, the author of Ready Player One
and also one of the screenwriters
of the upcoming film adaptation.
(upbeat music)
Whenever I mentioned a video game,
it was always something from my life
or a game that I loved for some reason
that I wanted to pay tribute to and have in the background.
Dungeons of Daggorath was one of my first 3-D video games
that I ever played for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2,
you play a warrior who has to descend
into a multi-level dungeon and defeat a bunch of creatures
and collect items and defeat an evil wizard
and it just really spoke to me as one of my favorite games
and I would play it late into the night.
One of the first challenges that Wade has to complete
is go into a recreation of James Halliday's bedroom,
and then complete Dungeons of Daggorath
to unlock the first gate.
Zork, the Great Underground Empire,
one of the first and best-known text adventure games.
And one of the first, you know, virtual worlds
that I ever explored as a gamer
even though it was based on text,
you kinda had to map out the playing area
and collect a group of treasures.
So that's another one of the games
that I wove into the book.
The planet of Frobozz that's depicted in the Zork games
is an actual whole planet in the Oasis
where the text-based game is recreated in virtual reality.
Pac-Man, one of the greatest blockbuster video games
of all time and one of the few classic arcade games
that actually has an ending due to a bug in the code.
It runs out of memory and you crash on 256th screen
so it is possible to play a perfect game of Pac-Man
and get the maximum amount of points.
That's another one of the challenges Wade has to complete
is play a perfect game of Pac-Man
in which he is rewarded with an extra life.
He gets the extra life differently in the movie.
I did use a MAME, multi-arcade machine emulator,
to jump to the 256 screen
using cheat codes so I could play that screen
and describe Wade playing it from first hand experience
as opposed to just watching videos.
It takes hours and years of skill.
Ms. Pac-Man even improved upon Pac-Man
and had better levels and the Atari 2600 port
of Ms. Pac-Man was far superior
to the Pac-Man port so I'm a Ms. Pac-Man fan.
- He gets a little nervous around pretty girls.
- Black Tiger is also another classic arcade game like Zork.
It was a game that almost caused a couple
of my friends to drop out of college.
It was really just addictive.
You have to send into a multi-level dungeon
and defeat multiple dragons
and it's recreated in the Oasis
as a virtual reality 3D experience
so he gets sucked into a Black Tiger cabinet
in a bowling alley arcade and then
has to navigate a three dimensional
virtual reality recreation of Black Tiger
using the same game mechanics.
Tempest, one of my favorite vector graphic video games.
The designer had a dream
about monsters coming up crawling out of a hole
coming at him and that helped inspire Tempest.
It was one of my favorite games
and it's a game that's also featured
in one of my favorite music videos
by the band Rush, Sub-Divisions.
The kid that's in the video is playing Tempest.
So for all those reasons I wove it into the story
and that's one of the games that need
to be defeated in the final challenge
and the character of Artemis helps Wade do so
by exploiting a bug that shipped
in the first version of Tempest
where if your score ended
on a certain combination of numbers
you get like 33 games off of one quarter.
Adventure, back in the 80s most of the games
took place on one screen but Adventure,
there was a whole kind of virtual world
that you could navigate with labyrinths
and different rooms and creatures
and items that you could pick up.
You would pick up a sword that would look
like an arrow.
It was all very crude but it was
such a powerful experience when I was a kid
and it was also the very first game
to have an Easter egg hidden in it.
Finding that Easter egg when I was a kid
helped inspire the whole story of Ready Player One,
the idea of a brilliant game designer
hiding an Easter egg in his virtual world
to find a worthy successor for his fortune and his company
all came from finding that Easter egg in Adventure.
- [Male] The first person to find the egg
will inherit half a trillion dollars
and total control of the Oasis.
- And that's why I'm so happy
that it made it all the way from my life
into the book and then into the movie.
Swordquest, another video game that helped
inspire the contest in Ready Player One.
Atari ran this amazing video game contest
through this series of four Swordquest games.
Kids all over the country would compete
to be the first to beat a Swordquest game
and the first person who won the grand prize
would win these amazing treasures
and nothing got me more excited as a kid
then oh, what, I could win like a gold chalice
and a gold crown, stuff that was
worth like 30,000 dollars in 80s money
by beating this game and it was,
that was one of the things that helped
inspire the idea of this video game contest
inside the Oasis.
- See you at the finish line.
- Joust is another one of my favorite classic arcade games,
Williams Electronics, where you
could battle one of your friends
and I remember lots of heated Joust battles
with my friends growing up
and so I wove that into the story as well.
Inside the first gate at the end
of a Tomb of Horrors recreation
the main character Parzival
has to play a game of Joust against Acererak
which is a Dungeons and Dragons villain
and defeat him and that's part
of the first challenge in the book.
Akalabeth is one of the first attempts
by a computer programmer to translate the experience
of playing Dungeons and Dragons into a computer game.
It was created by Richard Garriott
who also helped serve as the inspiration for James Halliday.
Richard Garriott's a famous video game designer
from Austin, Texas where I live
who had an alter ego of his Dungeons and Dragons
and game avatar called Lord British
and he would dress up as Lord British
in public, at press events and things
and he eventually ended up using his video game money
to travel into space and go
on the International Space Station so he
was really an inspiration to me as a geek
with unlimited funds and what could be accomplished.
So he and Howard Hughes helped
inspire James Halliday in my book
and his game Akalabeth and the games that followed it,
Ultima one, two, three, four,
and then Ultima Online, the first MMO,
those all helped inspire the Oasis in my novel.
Dig Dug is another weird 80s arcade game
based on a job of excavating and digging.
In the recreation that Parzival has to navigate
of War Games, it kind of goes
into the movie of War Games and is in
that 20 grand palace arcade
and so I actually rewatched that scene
when I was writing about it
and when Matthew Broderick's playing Galaga
there's a Dig Dug game where his notebook
is resting on it so I added that little detail.
That's how Dig Dug made it into Ready Player One.
Galaga is the game Matthew Broderick plays
in War Games so that was why it was mentioned
and I remember they sent him a copy of Galaga
to his home so he could practice for the movie.
Pretty cool.
Gorf, kind of the first Space Invaders rip off
where you had a shield.
I like the name Gorf more than the actual game.
Gorf somehow made it all the way into the movie.
You can see ColecoVision port of Gorf
at the end of the film.
EverQuest, one of the first massively multiplayer
online games after Ultima Online and EverQuest
gave rise to World of Warcraft
so that was one of the first MMO games
where I saw people that I worked with
at IT jobs, people would bring their laptops in
and be gold farming and grinding
to get experience points while they were working
throughout the day and I remember people
developing strong relationships
through this game of EverQuest
and meeting people online and falling in love
inside of EverQuest.
- [Wade] I came here to escape but I found my friends.
I found love.
- Created a new kind of human relationship.
Like there are people alive now
because their parents met inside World of Warcraft.
- [Female] Can you feel this?
- So that was one of the games
that helped inspire the Oasis
and why I mentioned it and World of Warcraft in the book.
Tennis For Two, one of the very, very first video games
ever made on oscilloscope which was really
just a rudimentary version of Pong
with a ball bouncing back and forth.
Space War, a bunch of model railroading nerds
at MIT created this game where you
get one ship battling the other
before there were even monitors
and they had to control their ships
using these switches that were built
into the PDP1 computer that they programmed it on
using paper tape.
Their arms got sore so they went back
to the model railroading shop
where they built model trains
and they built little wooden boxes
with switches and controls on them
creating the very first video game controllers
that they went back and plugged in
and played Space War and that's where it all began, people.
Colossal Cave was actually one
of the very first text adventure games.
I think the first text adventure game ever created
which was kind of the first virtual reality simulation
on a computer even though it was a world
built with just text.
It was still a world that you could navigate
and pick up items and slay creatures.
I think it's referenced as a precursor
to inspiring Zork.
Also inspiring the game Adventure.
Warren Robinett drew inspiration
from Colossal Cave when he created the Atari version.
Combat was the game that shipped with the Atari 2600.
We got it for Christmas in 1978.
You didn't have to drop quarters in.
You could just play it all day long.
My brother and I would play endlessly
just blowing each other up with tanks and bi-planes.
When Wade goes into a recreation,
a virtual reality of James Halliday's bedroom
that he has created inside the Oasis
he finds a shoebox next to the Atari
that has all the Atari games that he had
when he was a kid and I think these
were, to the best of my recollection,
the same Atari games that my brother and I had
when we were kids.
Combat, which came with the Atari
and Space Invaders.
You hold down the reset switch
when you turn the power on on Space Invaders,
you could get double shots, pretty awesome.
Pitfall, Kaboom, Star Raiders,
The Empire Strikes Back which I loved,
Star Master, Yars' Revenge, and ET the video game.
I always wished that we had more games
and so when I was an adult, I ended up
kind of collecting every Atari 2600 game ever made
to fulfill my childhood dream of owning them all.
Star Raiders was one of the first
kind of flight simulations space simulator games
where I used to build a little cockpit
in front of my family's giant television
in the early 80s and pretend I
was flying a spaceship and it had a little control pad
and you could enter navigation commands
and I loved Star Raiders.
Asteroids, one of the greatest quarter sucking
classic arcade games of all time
and one of the first games I got on my Atari 2600.
I would just play it endlessly
and I remember you get a four digit score,
that if you got to 9,999 it would flip over
and I would just spend my Saturdays
flipping that sucker over as many times as I could
so that's my tribute to Asteroids.
Centipede was a game that was in the lobby
of my hometown movie theater in Ashland, Ohio
and one of the first games I ever played
with a track ball.
We were getting blisters from playing Centipede.
It was such a fast paced frenetic game.
One of my favorites.
Battlezone, another game that I have at my home,
another vector graphic game
and the game that actually helped
inspire my second novel Armada as well.
The thing about Battlezone is it was the first game
that was ever purchased by the US army
and converted into an actual training simulator
for the Bradley fighting vehicle.
They changed Battlezone into a game called Bradley Trainer.
When I heard about that I was like wow,
you can play a video game and it
can train you to actually do real combat.
It was like a precursor to The Last Starfighter
of celebrating that idea of oh man,
if I got really good at a video game
my video game skills could help save the world.
- [Female] This isn't just a game.
I'm talking about actual life and death stuff.
- Astrosmash was like a mashup of Space Invaders
and Asteroids where you have Asteroids falling towards you
and you're shooting them from a ship
that goes across the bottom of the screen
and that was I think the game
that shipped with the Intellivision.
When you first got a brand new Intellivision
it came with Astrosmash and we never had Intellivision.
Only the rich kids in my neighborhood had one
so I had to go over to their house
and play Astrosmash.
I'm still jealous.
Astrosmash I believe is a game
that Parzival and H play in H's basement
when they're arguing about Sword Quest
and Ladyhawk soundtrack.
- What's going on?
- Just practicing my Mario Kart.
- Defender is a game that I could never master
in the arcade.
Had this amazing elaborate control panel
with a joystick and buttons
that were in a really inconvenient array
and so I would always get killed
and then once we got the Atari 2600 version
at home I mastered that.
So that's another one of my favorites.
Raaka Tu, the Madness and the Minotaur, Bedlam,
and Pyramid, those were all text adventure games
that I had on analog audio cassette
with my TRS-80 Telecomputer Two
which is my first home computer
and also the one that I played Dungeons of Daggorath on
and those games I would have to put
in a cassette recorder and fill it
with a volume knob and load the games
from analog tape back to digital on my TRS-80
and play them and I loved all of them
and I think those are adventure games
that Halliday has with his TRS-80 in the novel.
BurgerTime, sort of like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man
mixed together.
Having an avatar that has to navigate a maze.
You're a chef who has to build the burgers.
Wade creates his own Atari 2600 game
called The Stacks about climbing
through the stacks trailer park where he lives.
- [Wade] In 2045, Columbus is the fastest
growing city on Earth.
- You have to climb ladders and go
across girder platforms and things like that.
Kind of inspire by games like Donkey Kong and BurgerTime.
There are lots of video games in the 80s
that were kind of based on menial jobs
like Tapper where you had to be a bartender.
I didn't like games where you had to play a quarter
and then do a job.
I'd rather fight aliens.
Qbert, so frustrating.
I don't know why I mentioned Qbert.
I think just 'cause it's a funny name
and a funny looking creature
and I liked the way he would swear
when he would get killed.
Qbert had his own cartoon for a while in the 80s
he was so popular.
- When they said fame would go to my head
they weren't kidding.
- So props to Qbert.
Robotron 2084 is one of my favorite games
designed by Eugene Jarvis, the creator of Defender,
where you had one joystick to move your character
and another joystick to pick your firing direction
so you could move backwards but fire forwards.
It was a groundbreaking control system
for a game and one of the most fast paced,
frenetic games where you would feel
kind of assaulted after you finished playing.
Watching somebody play that who's really good at it
at high speed is really impressive
and that's what Wade does in the opening scene
when he's in the stacks.
He's playing it on an old laptop
that he's salvaged and he's playing Robotron
because it kind of helps him escape
from his life and it's just him versus the machine
and I'm a big Robotron fan.
Zaxxon, another game that I used
to have a coin op version.
I would cycle them out every few years
'cause after you had one game,
that's why people usually get multicades
but Zaxxon, one of the first 3D isometric games
where your ship could go up and down
at different altitudes.
You had to navigate through these flying fortresses.
Zaxxon was just one of my favorite games as a kid
and with a great name.
That was why I mentioned it in Ready Player One.
Time Pilot, just an awesome game from the 80s
that I used to love.
There was a sequel, Time Pilot 84 that I also loved
where you're flying a ship
and you slowly go back in time
and travel through different time periods
and you're fighting by-planes and UFOs
and it's just the coolest.
Contra is one of those two player games
like Ikari Warriors where you could team up
with your buddy and then just battle
through multiple levels.
Also the birth of the famous Contra code
for Nintendo games so yeah, that was another favorite.
Heavy Barrel was one of the first games
that I could beat with one quarter
'cause I would play it so much
and I knew where all the power ups and the pieces were.
It's a game where you navigate through a maze
and go battle (mumbling)
and you collect these different pieces
of heavy barrel giant gun that you
can just blow away anything.
So Heavy Barrel was one of my time wasting games
in my hometown arcade.
Vigilante, featured in the movie Slacker,
shot in my hometown by Richard Linkleiter,
that's why I love Vigilante but also
another one in my hometown bowling arcade
where you just are like a vigilante
and you gotta go beat up street punks
and take away their knives
and rescue your girlfriend I think.
Vigilante, good stuff.
Crime Fighters was a four player beat 'em up game
that was in the bowling alley in my hometown
and me and my Dungeons and Dragons buddies
would go down there and play four player Crime Fighters
and just loved it to death.
You could also beat up on each other
as opposed to just beating up on the bad guys
so we spent a lot of time
just ruining each other's games
and making your friends stick in more quarters
and so Crime Fighters is just one
of those games in the Oasis where they pass by it
and it's in the background.
Golden Axe, another game in my hometown Aladdin's Castle
over in Mansfield, Ohio.
I think it was three players
and another kind of D&D medieval beat 'em up game
that we loved so that was how Golden Axe made it in there.
Smash TV made by the very same people
who invented Robotron, Eugene Jarvis
and his team and they used the same control scheme
of having one joystick to move
and one joystick to fire but it was two player
so you could team up with your buddy.
Smash TV was kind of like the Running Man,
like a futuristic game show.
- [Male] Total carnage, good luck.
- Contestants would get killed
and kill the people and it's pretty dystopian
and brutal and I used to have it.
I used to have a coin op Smash TV in my home
so that's why I threw it in the book.
Street Fighter II, people started
to compete against each other, beating each other up
competitively, I just had friends
that were just obsessive about it.
I was never that good except with Chun Li
which is why I'm so happy that she's made it
into our movie.
Quake, oh my god, Quake was the ancestor of Doom.
When Doom and Doom II landed, it kind of
took over my friends and I, took over our lives.
It was the first kind of two dimensional
virtual reality first person shooter game
where you could jump in and battle each other.
Thing about Doom is you couldn't look up and down
and then when Quake came out, we became,
it was even better and three dimensional.
You had mouse look and you could look up and down.
Quake was like virtual reality.
Definite inspirations on Ready Player One
and we have a Planet Doom which
could very easily also be Planet Quake.
Those are some of the classic video games
mentioned in Ready Player One.
I doubt it but I think we gave it the old college try.
If you think of any others that we missed
go ahead and put them in the comments below.
- Are you willing to fight?
Help us save the Oasis.