Ready Player One

Ernest Cline's debut, Ready Player One, is a science fiction novel published in 2011. It is set in a dystopia in 2045 and follows Wade Watts as he hunts an easter egg inside a global virtual reality game; finding it would give him the game creator's fortune and control of the game. Cline sold the publishing rights in 2010 after a bidding war, and the book appeared on 16 August 2011.

Wade lives in a stacked trailer in Oklahoma City and spends nearly all of his time in the OASIS, the virtual world that most people use for school, work and everything else. Its creator died leaving his fortune and control of the OASIS to whoever finds the egg, which is hidden behind three challenges. The clues are all about the eighties culture he grew up on, and Wade has spent years studying it.

He is one of thousands hunting the egg, including a corporation that has moved in with an army of employees and a legal department. The hunt is public and the scoreboard is visible to everyone, so progress is measured in front of an audience. The novel's references to the films, games and music of the 1980s are part of its plot rather than decoration, and the first challenge is solved by knowing one of them well.

The Young Adult Library Services Association gave it an Alex Award, and it took the 2011 Prometheus Award. A film version, written by Cline with Zak Penn and directed by Steven Spielberg, came out in 2018, and a novel sequel followed.