Virtual world: all the updates, trailers and commentary for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One – The Verge

If you want to know how we ended up in a cyber dystopia, read Ready Player One

2018-04-19T06:00:02-04:00

When Ernest Cline's Ready Player One was published in 2011, the reviews were ecstatic, beatific. It was an "enchanting," "accessible" "nerdgasm" full of "fascinating social commentary" that one critic claimed was "the best science fiction novel I've read in a decade."

The book imagined America in the 2040s entirely through the lens of the 1980s, or at least a narrow sliver of the era: the formative video games, movies, and other nerd-friendly pop culture for the people who came of age during this particular decade. As the novel's world descends into chaos and poverty, thanks to climate change and a fossil-fuel crisis, most of its citizens s …

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What the Armada adaptation can learn from Ready Player One’s successes

2018-04-09T12:04:12-04:00

On April 4th, film trade outlets broke the news that Wrath of the Titans screenwriter Dan Mazeau has been hired to write a screenplay for Armada, the second novel by Ready Player One author Ernest Cline. The possibility of an Armada movie isn't breaking news; Cline sold the film rights to Universal in 2012, within a week of selling the book rights to Crown, a full three years before the novel was even published. But the trades are taking Mazeau's hiring as clear evidence that Armada is actually moving forward as a project, likely due to the financial success of Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One adaptation, the first Spielberg film to make …

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Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One improves immensely on the book

2018-03-30T12:36:31-04:00

Fans tend to either love or hate Ernest Cline's bestselling 2011 novel Ready Player One. There are legitimate reasons for both reactions. On the love side: it's a light, airy pop confection, crammed with familiar cultural references, which Cline recontextualizes in surprising ways. On the hate side: the prose can be extremely clumsy, as it is in this paragraph where teenage protagonist Wade Watts describes the virtual car he constructed for himself in the vast online world where he spends most of his waking hours:

The DeLorean came outfitted with a (nonfunctioning) flux capacitor, but I'd made several additions to its equipment and appearan …

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The final boss in the Ready Player One tie-in games is copyright law

2018-03-11T11:08:17-04:00

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Making a tie-in video game for Ready Player One fans seems like a maddening task.

After all, what does it mean to be a fan of Ready Player One, a piece of pop culture designed as a wrapper for other, often better pop culture? Does it mean being invested in the journey of digital treasure-hunter Wade Watts and his effort to protect the virtual reality world known as OASIS? Or is it more about enjoying its mashup of reference points, like DeLoreans, WarGames, and Rush?

If it's the latter, fans might be disappointed by the collection of Ready Player One-themed VR games that's being released soon for the HTC Vive. The collection is a lot more …

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Ernie Cline’s Ready Player One gets a tiny adaptation in this music video

2018-03-11T10:36:18-04:00

Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Ernie Cline's science fiction novel Ready Player One is due to hit theaters on March 29th, but synthwave band GUNSHIP beat him to the punch with the video to their latest single, "Art3mis & Parzival".

Opening with a short explanation for the world, the song is about the relationship between the book's two characters, Wade Watts (Parzival) and Samantha Cook (Art3mis), and their lives in the OASIS. The band released a video for the song, which turns out to be a pretty close adaptation of the book, following the pair as they play in the virtual world, search for clues in a massive easter egg hunt, and fend off …

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Are these Ready Player One posters supposed to be cool or cringeworthy?

2018-03-06T18:41:15-05:00

The advertising for Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One, which hits theaters on March 29th, treads a weird tonal line. Most of it presents the story of pop culture-obsessed future teenager Wade Watts as cool and exciting. But occasionally, the marketing feels like a surprisingly cutting takedown of the film's own premise. And I'm not sure where its newest promotional stunt, a series of elaborate movie poster mashups, is supposed to fall.

If you're not familiar with Ready Player One, it's set primarily in a virtual world called the OASIS, essentially a giant VR amalgamation of 20th century pop culture. So, naturally, the new images re-create …

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Play Joust, Robotron: 2048, and other classic games at Ready Player One’s online arcade

2018-03-02T14:57:01-05:00

A big appeal of Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One was its reverence toward the pop culture of the 1980s, from movies to video games. As the big-screen Steven Spielberg adaptation inches closer to theaters, the marketing masterminds at Warner Bros. have been tapping into that nostalgia with Easter egg-filled trailers, and now there's an online arcade with a number of vintage games to play.

Ready Player One takes place nearly 30 years in the future, where the real world has fallen into dystopic disrepair, and citizens find refuge in a massive, interconnected online world known as the OASIS. When the creator of the system dies, he leaves b …

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Steven Spielberg thinks that Ready Player One is a glimpse into our future

2018-01-22T09:24:27-05:00

With just a couple of months to go before Ready Player One hits theaters, Warner Bros. has released a new featurette that looks at the ties between Ernest Cline's novel and Steven Spielberg's films of the 1980s.

The featurette opens with scenes from some of Spielberg's iconic films: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, and others. Cline adds that he never would have been able to write his book without Spielberg's influence. The filmmaker returns the favor, saying that he thinks the book is glimpse into our future, depicting a population living in …

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Watch the new trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One

2017-12-10T13:02:20-05:00

We got our first look at Steven Spielberg's next big science fiction movie Ready Player One at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, and today, Warner Bros. released a new trailer on Facebook Live, with author Ernie Cline answering questions about the origins of the story.

Based Ernie Cline's debut novel, Ready Player One is set in a dystopian world where almost everyone spends a majority of their time in a virtual reality system known as OASIS, where players can visit any conceivable world (allowing the book to mash up an incredible number of '80s pop culture references). The trailer opens with Wade Watts (played by The Tree of Life / X-M …

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The Stranger Things and Ready Player One trailers are the best and worst of nostalgia-driven marketing

2017-07-26T12:08:49-04:00

At the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con, audiences got their first look at two highly anticipated geek-culture properties. Stranger Things, Netflix's ode to Steven Spielberg and Stephen King, got a second season trailer exploring the show's expanding mythos, set to the iconic sounds of Michael Jackson's "Thriller." And Spielberg himself took to Comic-Con's Hall H stage to reveal a teaser for Ready Player One, his adaptation of Ernest Cline's best-selling pop-culture treasure-hunt adventure.

At first glance, they were perfect pieces of marketing for the Comic-Con crowds, both relying on the nostalgic pull that serves as the foundation for so much mo …

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