I finally (finally) got around to reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I read it on a friend’s recommendation from like five or six years ago and just now got to it. We had been talking about Atari at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it increasingly grew on me as I read it. By the time I was a little over a hundred pages in I was hooked and barely read anything else while I plowed through it.
The book is set in the near future in the 2040s and is about an online contest established in an extremely wealthy man’s will that awarded a nine-figure amount to the first person to win the game. It was a cryptic and challenging contest, and required lots of knowledge of and, I daresay, love of all things 1980s. The narrative follows the path of Wade Watts, one of the players of the online game and a devoted contestant in the game-within-the-game. Wade’s journey is compelling and the chapters are short, which I think lends itself to nudging the reader along at a faster pace. I didn’t know at the time this was recommended to me and, indeed, not even at the time I started to read it that this was Ernest Cline’s first book. Well done.
I found myself wishing that the book had more fond memories that were similar to mine of the 1980s. There was still plenty of this book for me to love and to identify with, but the 1980s was a busy decade for media. There was a large breadth of directions one could go and, with my being a child at the time, my experiences were limited by what I was willing and able to seek exposure to.
A lot about the 1980s in terms of music, I came to know considerably later. It was the mid- to late 1990s by the time I was really into heavy metal and began to discover some of the bands that made significant and memorable contributions to the genre during the 1980s. My interests expanded to other influential musicians of the time. I loved music from the 1980s as much as I loved the stuff that was coming out then. I still listen to it even now, but not quite so narrowly that it is to the detriment of my listening to current music as well. I posted images of a few favorites of mine from the 1980s below.
In terms of films, at the time I had a relatively static group of VHS tapes and later, again in the 1990s once I was working, added to my collection both recent and 1980s films that I loved. Most of the films focused on in this work weren’t included in the collections I had access to at the time. That’s not an admonishment of the book – not at all. I think it speaks volumes about how much there was to sincerely love and enjoy that came out of that decade. That’s a good thing. Once again, a couple more favorites from the 1980s are posted below.
When it came to classic gaming, I had some more overlap but, again, some of the pieces referenced I didn’t play until much later - the 2000’s in in some cases….just due primarily to access. But there was enough gems I have played for me to enjoy the references and the nostalgia imbedded throughout this book. There was a lot of Joust love in this book, and I shared that love at the time and still do.
I sadly have never played a text adventure game, despite wanting to at the time and even now, and I also have never played a Dungeons & Dragons game and only have the foggiest notion of how those types of games even work. I missed both of those boats. I had a tiny circle of friends back in the day and no one who was into that or at least that was into that and was close enough to me to include me. I still have a relatively low number of friends – but I make it up in quality.
I haven’t seen the film yet. My wife has and enjoyed it, but I wanted to read the book first before watching the film. I’ll see it shortly.
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