Ready Player One

Ready Player One is a science fiction novel by Ernest Cline, first published in 2011. The plot centers around an open-world virtual reality metaverse that has replaced most other uses for the Internet. The virtual world, called the OASIS, provides functionality for entertainment, business, shopping, gaming, and communication. The book involves many aspects of virtual reality including immersion/haptics/input, potential educational/recreational/business uses, and elements of the metaverse.

The novel is set in 2045 and follows Wade Watts, a teenager who searches the OASIS for a hidden prize left by the world's late creator. It became a New York Times bestseller and won a 2012 Alex Award from the American Library Association. Within the VR industry the book was closely tied to Oculus VR: in 2013 the company wrote that the novel had "become required reading" around its office. Warner Bros. released a film adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg in March 2018, and HTC released VR experiences inspired by the film. A sequel novel, Ready Player Two, followed in November 2020.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked publication, plot, awards, Oculus influence, film production, box office, Oscar nomination, HTC VR tie-ins and sequel claims against the cited publisher, Kirkus, ALA, LFS, Oculus, Fortune, Deadline, SXSW, Road to VR, HTC, Box Office Mojo, CBS, Singularity Hub, TechCrunch and A.V. Club pages. About review dates.

Publication

The Crown imprint of Random House published the hardcover on 16 August 2011. An ebook and an unabridged audiobook read by Wil Wheaton came out on the same day; the audiobook runs 15 hours 41 minutes. Ballantine Books issued the trade paperback on 5 June 2012, with 384 pages.

By March 2015, Deadline reported, the book had been published in 40 countries. When Ballantine announced the sequel in 2020, the publisher stated that Ready Player One had spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, reached number one in print, ebook and audio, and been voted one of America's 100 most-loved books in PBS's The Great American Read.

Plot and setting

In 2045 the real world is a dystopia, and most people spend their time in the OASIS, a free virtual world. The narrator, 18-year-old Wade Watts, was orphaned at 11 and lives in a "vertical trailer park" in Oklahoma City. The OASIS's billionaire creator, James Halliday, left a will offering his estate to whoever finds an Easter egg hidden inside the simulation; riddles lead to three keys and three gates, and Halliday's clues draw on his obsession with 1980s pop culture, especially arcade games. Egg hunters are called "gunters". Whoever wins inherits Halliday's fortune and control of the OASIS itself.

Wade's avatar, Parzival, is the first gunter to win the Copper Key. His main rivals are the Sixers, contract gunters employed by the conglomerate IOI, which wants to take over the OASIS. After Wade refuses to join IOI, the company's head, Sorrento, has his trailer destroyed, killing his relatives while Wade is away. The Libertarian Futurist Society summarized the book as describing a virtual world with "an order without a state", in which the main characters work together without meeting in person until near the end.

Depiction of virtual reality

In the novel OASIS stands for "Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation", according to the publisher's educator guide. The opening chapter describes the basic hardware: Wade is introduced to the OASIS as a small child, "as soon as I was old enough to wear a visor and a pair of haptic gloves", and grows up using its free interactive educational programs and libraries. The same guide asks students to explain how the system's haptic technology and retina scans would work and how much of that technology already exists.

When the film was released, technology writers compared its hardware to real devices. Edd Gent of Singularity Hub wrote that the OASIS visors "supposedly work by beaming low-power lasers directly onto the user's retinas", whereas real headsets use stereoscopic displays held in front of the eyes. He described the film's entry-level kit as a visor and a pair of haptic gloves, and more elaborate setups with full-body haptic suits, harnesses and treadmills. As 2018 counterparts he named the HaptX glove, which combines kinaesthetic and tactile feedback using microfluidics, the Teslasuit, which uses electrical stimulation of nerves and muscles, and the Virtuix Omni omnidirectional treadmill. A TechCrunch comparison the same month said that "complete sensory VR immersion is years away" and pointed to location-based venues such as The Void, which required users to wear backpacks.

Influence on the VR industry

In a March 2013 blog post, written while it was preparing to ship Oculus Rift development kits, Oculus VR wrote that "Around Oculus, Ready Player One has become required reading", and reported that Cline had visited the office in February 2013 to try a demo and meet the team. In a 2015 Fortune interview, Cline said people at Oculus VR and other VR companies had told him the book was "one of their primary inspirations in getting into virtual reality". He said the novel came out while Palmer Luckey was running his initial Kickstarter campaign, and that Luckey recommended it to everyone who joined Oculus, including John Carmack and Michael Abrash. In the same interview he cited Oculus Touch, force-feedback suits and the Virtuix Omni treadmill as examples of technology he had imagined that was now being built, saying "It's amazing to see all of these things I had imagined happening." Road to VR later reported that in Oculus's early days all employees received a copy of the novel.

Awards

Year	Award	Result
2012	Alex Award (Young Adult Library Services Association)	Won
2012	Prometheus Award for Best Novel (Libertarian Futurist Society)	Won, tied with The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman
Not stated	School Library Journal "Best Adult Book 4 Teens"	Selected

Film adaptation

The rights to the movie were purchased by Warner Bros. In March 2015 Deadline reported that the studio had acquired them in 2010, before the novel was published, for producers Donald De Line and Dan Farah, and that Steven Spielberg would direct the film, with Zak Penn writing the latest draft of the script after Cline and Eric Eason. On June 5, 2015, UploadVR.com reported that the movie would have a VR tie-in as well as "heavy VR elements", but stated it "unlikely at this stage in virtual reality's life that a big budget Hollywood feature would have a full VR version".

Production

Spielberg directed the film from a screenplay by Zak Penn and Cline. It was produced by Donald De Line, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Spielberg and Dan Farah, and stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Philip Zhao, Win Morisaki and Hannah John-Kamen, with Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance. Warner Bros. Pictures and Amblin Entertainment presented it in association with Village Roadshow Pictures.

VR headsets were used during production. According to Road to VR, Girish Balakrishnan, the film's virtual production lead at Digital Domain, said that the team used the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and HoloLens at different stages, with the Rift used for motion capture shoots, the Vive for scouting with virtual cameras, and HoloLens on practical sets. Spielberg used a handheld virtual camera rig that motion capture production supervisor Clint Spillers developed with Digital Domain robotic engineer Jim Kundig, with its own small screen showing a real-time game engine render. Spielberg said an avatar let him "walk through the space and see the actual set", and that once he had planned each sequence he asked the actors to put on the goggles so they could get a feeling of what their environment looked like. Industrial Light & Magic produced the film's OASIS scenes, while Digital Domain handled motion capture and visual effects for the real-world portions.

Release and reception

The film had its world premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Austin during the SXSW Film Festival on 11 March 2018, and opened on 29 March 2018 in 2D and 3D in select theaters and IMAX. Box Office Mojo lists its earliest release, in EMEA and Asia-Pacific markets, as 28 March 2018.

Measure	Figure
Budget	US$175,000,000
Original release, worldwide gross	US$583,490,172
All releases including later re-releases, worldwide gross	US$607,874,422
Domestic gross, all releases	US$137,715,350

The film was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the 91st Academy Awards (Roger Guyett, Grady Cofer, Matthew E. Butler and David Shirk); the award went to First Man.

VR tie-ins

HTC showed eight experiences inspired by the film at the film's debut event at SXSW. Before the theatrical opening, HTC released Ready Player One: OASIS beta as a free download on Viveport, bundling three of them: Planet Gauntlet by Directive Games, Planet Doom: Battle for the OASIS by Steel Wool Studios, and Planet Doom: Rise of the Gunters by Drifter Entertainment, a co-op game for up to three players. On 17 April 2018 Road to VR reported that the free collection had launched on Steam with support for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality headsets, adding a fourth game, Smash, and an avatar creator from Morph3D.

On 28 March 2018 HTC announced that VR content inspired by the film, produced by its in-house publishing arm Vive Studios, was rolling out to 35 VR arcades, and that Microsoft Stores would feature Ready Player One content in 65 locations from 29 March. The titles were also available for home use through Viveport and for arcades through Viveport Arcade. Other tie-ins included Aech's Garage in Sansar, an environment built from ILM's original design for the film, and The Distracted Globe in TheWaveVR, a zero-gravity dance club based on a scene in the film.

Sequel

On 9 July 2020 Ballantine Books announced Ready Player Two for publication on 24 November 2020. The publisher's description says that days after winning Halliday's contest, Wade finds a technological advancement hidden in Halliday's vaults. In her review for The A.V. Club, Samantha Nelson wrote that in the book's first 100 pages Wade releases a technology called the OASIS Neural Interface (ONI), which lets users fully embody their avatars and even share memories, and that Wade becomes addicted to it. She concluded that the sequel fails to make up for the problems of the original.

See also

• Metaverse
• Snow Crash
• Haptic gloves
• Omnidirectional treadmill
• Virtual retinal display