Ready Player One - A Review

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a novel released in 2011. It depicts a dystopia where most of the world spends all of their time inside a virtual reality video game called the OASIS. When James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS dies, he offers an “egg hunt” (scavenger hunt), where the first person to find a secret “egg” in his game, gets to inherit all of his wealth and full control of the OASIS.

The movie and novel share this basic premise and plot however as we soon see, there are many key differences that make the novel far more superior compared to the film.

The first major difference that is prevalent, are the keys, gates, and how they work as a whole. In the film, we jump right into the finding of the "copper key" where it appears that all you have to do is win a car race, and it just happens to be that everyone knows this race leads to the copper key. In the novel, the setting is very different. Halliday leaves no clue or obvious game that leads to the copper key. The first clue is found when "gunters" (egg hunters) go through his almanac and find secret letters with small notches that when put together spell out the first clue:

The Copper Key awaits explorers

In a tomb filled with horrors

But you have much to learn

If you hope to earn

A place among the high scorers

Wade Watts, the protagonist, uses his wit to figure out that the copper key is on a planet meant for learning, or school. Using that knowledge, he finds the copper key on his school planet and becomes famous for being the first person in history to be on the

leaderboard.

Another major deviation is the role the character "IR0ck" plays in the story. For the film adaptation, IR0ck is a ruthless bounty hunter who is working for the I0I, whereas in the book, Ir0ck does play a small role in sharing to the world of the copper key, but after that he is never spoken about again.

Also noticeable in the movie is the low emphasis about the roles each of the gates play. In the novel, when a player gains a key, instead of going straight to the next key, the player must look for the corresponding gate. Each gate holds their own challenges, like recreating old movies as an actor.

The final change that may have irked some novel readers, is the fact that the final gate was totally reworked. In the novel Wade has to race against Sorrento and 20 other IOI employees to get to the egg. But in the movie, he has seemingly limitless amount of time to ponder the final challenge.

Overall, the movie itself was not bad, but compared to the book, you can see where the director had to make some very difficult decisions in order adapt the story to a visual medium which in turn made the movie feel quite different from the book.