Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
The hunt for Halliday's egg wasn't the only contest in Ready Player One. The book holds a hidden Easter egg for readers as well. In August 2012, after two months of competition, one reader who managed to find the Easter egg and clear three gates hidden online by Cline was awarded the grand prize: an actual Delorean, like from Back to the Future. Did you notice the hint during your read-through? (Source.)
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst also held an essay contest for incoming freshmen based on what they got out of the novel and how they relate its futuristic setting to our modern life. And to think we were stuck reading Anna Karenina. (Which we now know is awesome.) (Source.)
Just to make sure every pop culture base is covered, Warner Bros purchased the film rights to Ready Player One before it was even published. Little is known about the movie at this time, but we're looking forward to seeing how they combine the book's dystopian reality and utopian virtual reality on film. (Source.)
Ready Player One was on numerous best books of 2011 lists from nerd havens like Wired and io9 to more mainstream sites like Amazon.com and Entertainment Weekly, showing that it's of interest to people of varying ages and levels of geekiness. Is it one of your new favorites? (Source.)
Wade and Aech talk about Swordquest, a series of Atari games in which players can win real-life treasures. This idea didn't die out in the '80s. In 2005, Majesco, publishers of the Xbox game Advent Rising, offered a $1,000,000 prize to players who could find a hidden Easter egg in the game. (Sound familiar?) This contest, like Swordquest, was also canceled. Talk about a rotten egg. (Source.)
The story behind Gregarious Simulation Systems' first game, Anorak's Quest, has roots in reality. Ken and Roberta Williams, founds of Sierra On-line, a gaming powerhouse of the '80s and '90s, got their start doing the same thing with their first game, Mystery House. They programmed the game at home, copied it to floppy disks, plopped them in plastic baggies, and voila! The first text adventure with graphics was born. (Source.)
Many current MMORPGs already follow OASIS's free-to-play (F2P), with no monthly fee, structure. Kotaku believes the subscription-based MMO is dead (time of death: 2012), and microtransactions will be the way of the future. (Source.)
The Copper, Jade, and Crystal quests are each set in places with multiple identical instances: 256, 512, 1028, respectively. These may seem like random numbers, but it all has to do with binary numbers and how data is stored. Your 500GB hard-drive is actually 512GB. (Source.)