Ready Player One - Ernest Cline, a mini review

After seeing a bunch of online hype about this book, I bought a paperback copy of Ready Player One to keep me company on an international flight. It started off on the wrong foot, a gratuitous eighties trivia wankfest with no end in sight. Then the narrative started and it was pretty damn good and I read the whole thing in one sitting. I was an easy mark, stuck on a plane, but it was still pretty good and I am reading it again. The plot is almost irrelevant, (rich guy dies, creator of massive virtual world, creates virtual world competition to inherit his fortune, all based on his childhood in the eighties, story ensues), I was very comfortable with the all the cultural references having lived it. I was born the same year as the author (and the character who set up the eighties virtual universe) so I am right there in the sweetspot where all the D&D, movies and arcade and console games mentioned are very real to me. I am guessing if you were born between 1970 and 1975 you might feel the same way. I am not sure how much older or younger you would have to be for the cultural references to be enough lost on you that you might not enjoy the book. Its a good read, but it really relies on your familiarity with the eighties. You probably should have played some role playing games and spent some time in arcades and on atari consoles as well. So, uh, if you are about 37-42 and like easy reading Sci-fi and played some D&D and arcade games back in the day, you will probably love this. Otherwise, I have no guarantees. Ideally, you should buy this in ebook form. Even more ideally the ebook would have built in emulators so you could play all the games mentioned in the book, but I bet it does not. It should be a movie soon, so maybe you can just watch that, because at this level of meta entertainment, it should not matter all, there is no real literature being achieved here. Or just watch tron. Yeah! - new recommendation, just watch Tron or better yet, Tron Legacy, cause its pretty much the same thing as this book. But with more Jeff Bridges. Tron Legacy baby! Woo!