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 medievals 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.