I've been to Oculus a few times to do book signings and things there, and they tell me 'Ready Player One' is, like, required reading for new employees.
— Ernest Cline
I have such a vivid memory of seeing science fiction movies and going to the lobby and playing whatever the space games were, and imagine I was blowing up the Death Star.
I wanted to be able to write in the voice that I talk to my friends and assume that everybody would know what I was talking about.
I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.
I'm surprised that VR has come about so quickly. It's lucky I just happened to write a book imagining virtual reality right on the cusp of it actually happening.
In a zombie apocalypse movie, nobody's ever seen a zombie movie. Or in an alien invasion movie, nobody has ever seen an alien invasion movie, like 'Independence Day.'
I still tell people, 'I'm pretty sure I'm the only 'Star Wars' fan in history to ever break into Skywalker Ranch by writing a movie about breaking into Skywalker Ranch.'
Now, a lot of early VR worlds or universes that are coming online take inspiration from 'Ready Player One.' It's just the coolest thing ever.
Personally, I'm kind of swirling in this hurricane of virtual reality because of 'Ready Player One.'
I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1's 'I Love the '80s' gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation.
I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.'
My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.
I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.
What's really astounding to me is a lot of the guys at Oculus VR and other companies who were creating VR tell me that 'Ready Player One' is one of their primary inspirations in getting into virtual reality.
It's weird that, in a way, by writing about video games, I get to develop them, too.
Growing up in rural Ohio, I knew my way around a double-wide pretty well.
I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.
Everything you could ever want to happen happened to me when 'Ready Player One' came out.
'Star Wars' was the mythology of my youth. I longed for adventure.
'Fanboys' was the first real screenplay that I ever wrote that was an original story with my own characters.
Gibson wrote 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter, you know, before the technology he was writing about existed.
I don't know if the '80s were unique, but we certainly got original, groundbreaking stuff at the time with movies like 'Back to the Future' and 'Star Wars' - movies that became classics.
I've wanted to own a DeLorean since I was 10 years old, but it always seemed like a silly daydream. Like owning the 'A-Team' van or something.
I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them.
I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.
Once the people of planet Earth are all hanging out together online in a virtual world without any borders, I think it could change social networking, entertainment and even politics.
I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.
When you're hanging out with your friends, you reference books and movies, and you don't always know if your friends know what you're referencing. But you throw it out there, and if it connects, it makes people laugh.
I don't even think I was quite a year old. My mother was maybe seven months pregnant with my little brother. I was sucked out of her arms, and she landed 75 yards away from our trailer and had a ruptured disc. The tornado set me down on top of this pile of corrugated lumber and scrap metal.
VR really changes everything for flight because the old simulators for the PC were 2D, and you couldn't look around inside the cockpit and learn the controls or even track other planes through the cockpit.
Whenever I watch 'The Matrix,' I think that it is possible, but I don't think that it's going to be machines enslaving humans.
In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing 'Ready Player One.' I could throw in everything that I love.
I was always obsessed with the 'Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,' this weird little cult movie. There was this promised sequel before the end credits - 'Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League' - and I knew instinctively they were never going to make that movie, because the first one had made, like, $8 at the box office.
For the whole history of cinema, we've been experiencing movies and television through a two-dimensional, letterboxed window. But once you can start programming entertainment for all the different senses, it becomes a wholly different medium.
I notice when I'm at a party where I don't know anybody - even if I have nothing in common with somebody - we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.
I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.
Before I became a full-time writer, I worked in tech support in those giant cubicle farms you see. I was surrounded by people who played video games all the time - sometimes actually in the call centers, playing online multiplayer games. I saw friends of mine who began to feel that going online was more compelling to them than real life.
I'm incredibly nostalgic for the '80s, because I think that's when Geek Culture really kicked in to high gear.
I think it's a bit silly to brand the Internet as the 'downfall of youth.'
