He dreamed up his novel about a teenage games fanatic while working for internet companies in the 90s. Cline on his real-life geek-to-riches story – and what it was really like working with Steven Spielberg
It took Ernest Cline 10 years to write Ready Player One. There were times he thought he would never finish the manuscript, let alone publish it. But the novel, mostly set in a global online pleasure world called Oasis, went on to become a bestseller and was translated into more than 20 languages. Now a film adaptation by Steven Spielberg is in cinemas – a real-life geek-to-riches drama so reflective of the book’s plot it seems almost unfeasible.
The sci-fi story’s setup is simple. Teen protagonist Wade Watts is a games fanatic living in a slum town outside Oklahoma City, but spending most of his time in the virtual world. The death of James Halliday, the eccentric creator of Oasis, triggers a treasure hunt that revolves around Halliday’s main obsession: 1980s pop culture. Whoever solves a series of puzzles within the game becomes its new billionaire CEO. Wade enters the hunt, kicking into gear a breathless nerd empowerment fantasy.
“Wade is the embodiment of me as a teenager,” Cline admits. “The structure of Ready Player One was a fun way for me to take all of the useless movie and video-game trivia you amass if you’re a geek and somehow make it valuable – the key to a vast fortune, which it has proven to be for me.”
Cline had been working in IT since the mid-1990s, doing tech support at emerging internet firms like CompuServe, where he realised how the internet was about to change the world. In his spare time, he was playing video games – a lot of video games. As a teenager in Austin, Texas, in the early 80s, he had witnessed the dawn of the coin-op era, feeding quarters into Pac-Man, Joust and Robotron machines. As an adult, seeing his work colleagues ensconced in online multiplayer games such as Ultima Online and World of Warcraft, he began imagining what might happen when gaming, the internet and virtual reality converged.
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At first he dabbled in screenwriting. “The VCR landed in my teenage years, and opened up the whole world of film to me,” he says. “It turned me into an uber cinephile, and I watched all my favourite movies over and over again. I felt very much like Wade – my heroes were George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, John Milius, John Hughes. I would order copies of their screenplays and study them.”
In the early 2000s, Cline got a film script made, but the movie – Fanboys, about a bunch of kids trying to access Skywalker Ranch to see an early cut of The Phantom Menace – was disjointed and awkward. “It took years for the movie to get made, and my screenplay got heavily altered,” he says, recalling battles with producers about changing the plot and characters. “It was all very dispiriting. But it prompted me to finish the novel, because I wanted to see what would happen when I had total control over the end product, as opposed to movies where you have almost no control over anything.”
Ready Player One channels 80s geek obsessions into a text that reflects the language of emerging internet culture. The book has often been criticised for its lack of characterisation and dramatic tension: the three trials that make up the backbone of the plot are hastily reported, with constant pop culture references substituting for the character’s internal life. But this may be part of its appeal. The novel reads and functions like a video game walkthrough guide, or a forum post about someone’s favourite gaming moments; it is commentary rather than a narrative. It’s a novel for people who grew up parsing pop culture through the lens of news group fave lists and flame wars.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fanboy … Ernest Cline, right, with director Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles. Photograph: Eric Charbonneau/Rex/Shutterstock
But that slightly distanced approach was never going to work for a movie – and neither were the original puzzle tasks. In the book, the competitors for Halliday’s prize have to play specific video games to completion and re-enact vast tracts of cult films such as WarGames and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s fun on the page, but no one wants to watch Tye Sheridan spend six hours getting a high score on Pac-Man.
Cline worked with co-screenwriter Zak Penn and with Spielberg to create a modified set of trials for the film, including a new opener: an astonishingly vivid, high-speed car race through a virtual city. The second trial still involves Wade visiting an Oasis-based reproduction of a classic movie, but it’s not WarGames. Instead, he has to navigate through a terrifying virtual version of The Shining’s Overlook hotel, complete with spooky twins and an elevator full of blood. “WarGames didn’t seem quite right because, although it’s a great film, it’s not that visually arresting. We wanted a movie with a unique and familiar environment,” says Cline. “We made a list of possibilities, and when Steven saw The Shining [on it] he lit up. That was one of the most fun [things about] of working on the adaptation – cooking up this Shining funhouse tribute, and getting to see my hero geek out.”
The movie also fleshes out the supplementary characters, especially Wade’s love interest, Art3mis, who is also embedded in Oasis and competing for the prize. In the book, she’s a paper-thin virtual idol, whom Wade stalks and harries for attention. Her role is a lonely geek’s dream girl: a beautiful woman who shares Wade’s pop culture obsessions and approvingly acknowledges his references. We meet the real woman behind the Art3mis avatar only at the end of the novel, at which point her function is to symbolise the book’s “real life is more important than games” moral swerve.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Olivia Cooke as Art3mis in Ready Player One. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/AP
In the movie, she leads a resistance group against the evil IOI Corporation, which wants to seize control of Oasis so it can be massively monetised. Actor Olivia Cooke, best known for her role in the horror TV drama Bates Motel, adds charm and depth to the character. She is given a life outside Wade’s yearning.
Cline acknowledges the book’s solipsistic focus, and puts it down to his inexperience as a novelist. “In retrospect, one of the ways I made it easier for myself to write the novel was by using a first-person narrative,” he says. “Because it was such a sprawling story, anchoring the point of view with one character made it easier for me to keep track of what was going on – I could show the whole world from his perspective, but this ended up limiting the other characters. One of the biggest advantages of retelling the story cinematically is to give them more to do. Instead of Wade doing everything, Art3mis has much more agency – she has a backstory and a personal investment in taking down IOI.”
Spielberg's Ready Player One – in 2045, virtual reality is everyone's saviour Read more
What also helps is having Spielberg in charge of the adaptation. The director famously started playing video games while making Jaws, inserting a brief glimpse of the Sega game Killer Shark into the movie, and he respected Cline’s novel. “Through the production he had a dog-eared copy of the paperback that was filled with Post-it notes and highlighted sections,” says Cline. “He gave copies of the book to other departments. So many things from the book that were never in the script made their way into the movie because he had everyone refer to the text for set design and even costumes. When you meet Aitch for the first time, she’s wearing the Rush 2112 T-shirt she’s wearing in the novel – that was something the costume designer took right from the page. It was everything you’d hope would happen as a novelist.”
What the movie confirms, with its luscious video game imagery and addition of fresher references (of everything from Chucky to Overwatch), is that there are more geeks around than ever before. Revelling in memories of favourite games, films and characters is now a mainstream pastime. In 2001, Cline never saw this coming. “I didn’t have any audience in mind when I wrote the book,” he says. “I thought maybe a few people who remembered the 1980s might enjoy it, and if I was lucky it might become a cult novel in certain circles. But it never occurred to me that it would have mass appeal, because how could it? It was so specific to me and my interests. It still blows my mind.”
Virtual reality is the air guitar solo of modern cinema: a frenetic imagined activity in a made-up world that exists one level below the already made-up world of the story. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, adapted from the 2011 YA novel by Ernest Cline, takes us on a freakily spectacular VR gaming ride through an infinitely malleable universe involving a frantic splurge of 70s and 80s pop culture references, including cheeky bits of Spielberg’s own creation. There’s loads of geekupmanship – though real geeks won’t be happy about the holy hand grenade of Antioch being deployed without counting to three.
Ready Player One: Ernest Cline on how his gamer fantasy became a Spielberg film Read more
But as with all VR on film, from Tron in 1982 to the new Jumanji of 2017, I found a weightless, frictionless quality to this inner zone of digitally rendered experience. It’s a close encounter of the pixelated kind. Where’s the beef? And the movie is left with the tricky and anticlimactic business of negotiating the relationship between virtual reality and the boring old actual sort.
The film is set in 2045, and though we may yet see a fashion for YA dramas about pre-apocalyptic utopias, Ready Player One isn’t one of them. The future world is pretty badly beaten up after a series of wittily imagined seismic catastrophes, including the “bandwidth riots”. Cities are massive scuzzy slums and virtual reality is the opium of the masses. Tye Sheridan is Wade Watts, a lonely teenager living in Columbus, Ohio, which is now a gruesome favela of trailers stacked on top of each other. His only interest isstrapping on the VR headset and entering the alternative universe of Oasis, as a mythic avatar named Parzifal. Here is a limitless fantasyscape of the mind where people can play games and have experiences. (The film hints subliminally at X-rated experiences in motels for those interested.) They can win digital money in various contests but possibly blow it all – “lose their shit”.
The game’s creator is the late James Halliday, played by Mark Rylance, an ubernerd genius who is a cross between Willy Wonka, Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee. Before he died, Halliday hid three clues in his world for an “Easter egg” that would allow the discoverer complete control of this fabulous spectral kingdom. So Wade is an egg hunter or “gunter” along with some friends, including supercool Samantha (avatar: Art3mis), played by Olivia Cooke, on whom he has a painful cybercrush. His best friend is Aech (Lena Waithe). But creepy corporate goon Sorrento, played by Ben Mendelsohn, wants to grab the egg, and crush all these creative individuals for whom the Oasis is a wonderful playground. There’s a funny performance from TJ Miller as Sorrento’s morose henchman i-R0k.
The Oasis sure is a weird setup. We are invited to believe in the dreamy almost Christ-like vision of Halliday and his Easter egg, but he has created what amounts to a horrible Matrix blue-pill of global addiction. Wade’s Aunt Alice (Susan Lynch) has had her life effectively ruined by a violent boyfriend Rick (Ralph Ineson) who is hooked on its gambling potential. It isn’t at all clear how or if Wade will reform this, on finding the egg. Then there are those 80s references, including a gobsmacking romp through the world of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. It’s 2045: how has Halliday conceived this obsession with that period? At one stage we see a simulacrum of his childhood bedroom, which looks like he grew up in the 70s and 80s. Did he grow up in some retro theme park? Or do future connoisseurs simply believe pop culture simply died with the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Facebook Twitter Pinterest We’re going on an egg hunt … Ready Player One. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk
Well, the movie does sort of answer these worries with the first clue that Wade chases after. He spots the great man’s whimsical and subversive interest in “going backwards” and realises that it may be the key to the extraordinary drag race in a fabricated New York. That really is a sensational, gasp-inducing sequence with an uproarious, showstopping appearance from King Kong. The solution to this clue brings the curtain down on the first act, but the first act is where nearly all the juice is. From then on, the action gets clotted and muddled and somehow contrives to separate Samantha from Wade and his friends to create a narrative crisis.
It’s a film in which Spielberg’s traditional reverence for the wonder and idealism of youth has had to compromise with wised-up survivalist toughness of the new YA mode. But what extraordinary visuals this films conjures up, with images that appear and disappear like quicksilver memes.
That material has issues of its own. Mr. Cline’s book — readable and amusing without being exactly good — is a hodgepodge of cleverness and cliché. Less than a decade after publication, it already feels a bit dated, partly because its dystopian vision seems unduly optimistic and partly because its vision of male geek rebellion has turned stale and sour.
In the film, set in 2045, Wade Watts (a young man played by the agreeably bland, blandly agreeable Tye Sheridan) lives in “the stacks,” a vertical pile of trailers where the poorer residents of Columbus, Ohio (Oklahoma City in the book), cling to hope, dignity and their VR gloves. Humanity has been ravaged by the usual political and ecological disasters (among them “bandwidth riots” referred to in Wade’s introductory voice-over), and most people seek refuge in a digital paradise called the Oasis.
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That world — less a game than a Jorge Luis Borges cosmos populated by wizards, robots and racecar drivers — is the creation of James Halliday (Mark Rylance). After Halliday’s death, his avatar revealed the existence of a series of Easter eggs, or secret digital treasures, the discovery of which would win a lucky player control of the Oasis. Wade is a “gunter” — short for “egg hunter” — determined to pursue this quest even after most of the other gamers have tired of it. Among his rivals are a few fellow believers and Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the head of a company called IOI that wants to bring Halliday’s paradise under corporate control.
In the real world, IOI encourages Oasis fans to run up debts that it collects by forcing them into indentured servitude. Sorrento’s villainy sets up a battle on two fronts — clashes in the Oasis mirroring chases through the streets of Columbus — that inspires Mr. Spielberg to feats of crosscutting virtuosity. The action is so swift and engaging that some possibly literal-minded questions may be brushed aside. I, for one, didn’t quite understand why, given the global reach of the Oasis, all the relevant players were so conveniently clustered in Ohio. (If anyone wants to explain, please find me on Twitter so I can mute you.)
But, of course, Columbus and the Oasis do not represent actual or virtual realities, but rather two different modalities of fantasy. Wade’s avatar, Parzival, collects a posse of fighters: Sho, Daito, Aech and Art3mis, who is also his love interest. When the people attached to these identities meet up in Columbus, they are not exactly as they are in the game. Aech, large and male in the Oasis, is played by Lena Waithe. But the fluidity of online identity remains an underexploited possibility. In and out of the Oasis, Art3mis (also known as Samantha, and portrayed by Olivia Cooke) is a male fantasy of female badassery. Sho (Philip Zhao) and Daito (Win Morisaki) are relegated to sidekick duty. The multiplayer, self-inventing ethos of gaming might have offered a chance for a less conventional division of heroic labor, but the writers and filmmakers lacked the imagination to take advantage of it.
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The most fun part of “Ready Player One” is its exuberant and generous handing out of pop-cultural goodies. Tribute is paid to Mr. Spielberg’s departed colleagues John Hughes and Stanley Kubrick. The visual and musical allusions are eclectic enough that nobody is likely to feel left out, and everybody is likely to feel a little lost from time to time.
Nostalgia? Sure, but what really animates the movie is a sense of history. The Easter egg hunt takes Parzival and his crew back into Halliday’s biography — his ill-starred partnership with Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), his thwarted attempts at romance — and also through the evolution of video games and related pursuits. The history is instructive and also sentimental in familiar ways, positing a struggle for control between idealistic, artistic entrepreneurs (and their legions of fans) and soulless corporate greedheads.
Halliday is a sweet, shaggy nerd with a guileless Northern California drawl and a deeply awkward manner, especially around women. Sorrento is an autocratic bean counter, a would-be master of the universe who doesn’t even like video games. These characters are clichés, but they are also allegorical figures.
In the movie, they represent opposing principles, but in our world, they are pretty much the same guy. A lot of the starry-eyed do-it-yourselfers tinkering in their garages and giving life to their boyish dreams back in the ’70s and ’80s turned out to be harboring superman fantasies of global domination all along. They shared their wondrous creations and played the rest of us for suckers, collecting our admiration, our attention and our data as profit and feudal tribute.
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Mr. Spielberg incarnates this duality as perfectly as any man alive. He is the peer of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and a Gandalf for the elves and hobbits who made Google, Facebook and the other components of our present-day Oasis. He has been man-child and mogul, wide-eyed artist and cold-eyed businessman, praised for making so many wonderful things and blamed for ruining everything. His career has been a splendid enactment of the cultural contradictions of capitalism, and at the same time a series of deeply personal meditations on love, loss and imagination. All of that is also true of Halliday’s Oasis. “Ready Player One” is far from a masterpiece, but as the fanboys say, it’s canon.
Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg’s new movie that opens Thursday, may take place in 2045, but its soundtrack is straight from the last century.
Alan Silvestri’s score leads the way, but in between his expansive, often futuristic-sounding compositions are a bevy of licensed tracks from the ‘70s and ‘80s, including Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” New Order’s “Blue Monday” and Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive,” that will take anyone in the audience straight back to the first time they played Space Invaders.
WaterTower Music will release Ready Player One: Songs From The Motion Picture on Friday. Billboard exclusively premieres the track listing below. The same day, Silvestri’s score becomes available via Ready Player One: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. A 2-CD version of the score will come out April 6 with double vinyl and cassette configurations planned for this summer. Ready Player One: Songs From The Motion Picture will be available digitally only.
While all the tunes on the Songs album are readily available on streaming services, should the movie do as well as expected, many could see three-digit upticks following the film’s opening weekend: after the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel came out in 2017, the 14 ‘70s and ‘80s nuggets on its soundtrack cumulatively soared 231 percent in on-demand streams and 388 percent in sales, according to Billboard.
Ready Player One, based on Ernest Cline’s 2011 science fiction novel about the battle for OASIS, an immersive virtual universe, takes its musical template from the book as well. The best seller mentions hundreds of songs, giving the filmmakers great suggestions when it came to making their selections. “There are 500 songs in the book, so it pretty much covers everything,” says Zak Penn, who wrote the screenplay with Cline.
“The book really leans heavily on ‘80s trivia because the contest is all about the ‘80s, but when you have to build OASIS, not everything is going to be an ‘80s reference,” says Penn. Therefore, we hear earlier hits such as The Temptations’ 1971 classic “Just My Imagination,” which also got added because it is one of Spielberg’s favorite songs, Penn says. Spielberg also personally picked Bruce Springsteen’s “Stand On It” (Trivia buffs will know that the “Glory Days” B-side also appeared in the 1986 movie, Ruthless People).
The final musical choices were ultimately Spielberg’s, but he took suggestions from the book, Penn, Cline, and even cast members, including Ben Mendelsohn, who plays the villain. “He was open to anything, he’s so collaborative” Penn says, “But everything is ultimately his decision. In terms of Spotify playlists, Ernie had an exhaustive one and I had a trimmed-down one [we gave Spielberg], but in the end, these are his choices.
Whereas a music supervisor would usually help coordinate the musical selections, Spielberg seldom uses one since his movies are usually score driven with very few, if any, licensed tracks. "Steven doesn’t do a lot of needle drops, he rarely will have songs in his movies,” Penn says. “I joked with him that this was like a Scorsese film with all its needle drops.” He also credits Toby Emmerich, who was upped to chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group as the film was being made, with taking an active role. “He was really helpful,” Penn says. “There were a few songs that were getting swapped in and out and it was good to have him there.”
Track listing for Ready Player One: Songs From The Motion Picture
“I Wanna Be Your Lover” Prince
“Everybody Wants To Rule The World” T ears For Fears
“Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)” The Temptations
“Stand On It” Bruce Springsteen
“One Way Or Another” Blondie
“Can't Hide Love” Earth, Wind & Fire
“Blue Monday” New Order
“Stayin' Alive” Bee Gees
“We're Not Gonna Take It” Twisted Sister
“You Make My Dreams” Daryl Hall & John Oates
“Pure Imagination” Bryan Nguyen feat. Merethe Soltvedt
