Ernest Cline hit one out of the park with his first novel, Ready Player One, which is in its 17th printing at Crown Publishing Group. Steven Spielberg is going to turn the virtual reality online video game adventure into a feature film for Warner Bros. Pictures. And if Cline has things his way, the movie will open up a Ready Player One massively multiplayer online (MMO) virtual reality game.
“Warner Bros. made The Matrix films and when they did that they released an MMO called The Matrix Online that had all the characters from the movies and kind of recreated the reality of the movies,” said Cline. “It was really popular and a great promotional tool for the sequels. When the Ready Player One movie comes out in a few years a lot of people will have virtual reality goggles plugged into their home computers and game consoles and televisions and will already be playing games with them. So it’s conceivable that Warner Bros. would create a low-res early version of the Oasis as an MMO game. People could watch the movie and then go home and act out the movie in the VR game. It could continue to exist and evolve and eventually come to resemble the Oasis from the book.”
Cline realizes that The Matrix Online game didn’t last very long, but that’s because the sequels were not that successful. With Spielberg, who’s a big gamer and VR fan, at the helm of Ready Player One, this idea has real potential.
Rather than writing a sequel that was guaranteed to connect with his huge audience of fans, Cline decided to go in a completely different direction with his sophomore novel, Armada. While he was creating a brand new sci-fi universe that also predominantly focused on video games and virtual reality, he was constantly pulled back into Ready Player One. That novel was accepted as a common read at over a dozen universities, and each school asked the author to come speak to their freshmen class after they had read the book.
During the two-and-a-half years I was writing Armada, I went and visited over a dozen universities like Amherst and the University of Northern Iowa to discuss and get grilled about Ready Player One by college freshmen,” said Cline. “And then the movie news was evolving, so it was hard to shut that out while working on the book, but I managed to do it. That’s why it maybe took me a little longer than I anticipated. The hardest part was just getting back to that place of trying to write the book that you’ve always wanted to read. Writing a book takes a long time, so I have to be able to maintain my own interest in it or I know the reader won’t be able to. That’s why I always end up writing about video games and popular culture and movies and weaving all that into the story because it makes the story more fun for me.”
Armada takes elements from films like The Last Starfighter and books like Ender’s Game and mixes in real science like Quantum Data Teleportation (the ability to transfer lossless data across vast distances), military drones, and virtual reality. The concept is to let video gamers pilot spacecraft from the safety of Earth using virtual reality to fight invading alien forces. Cline notes that other sci-fi works have placed children in harm’s way by sending them into the battle. VR allows his gamers to remain safe at all times.
Cline’s brother is a Marine bomb technician that operates ground-based explosive ordinance disposal drones. The controls for both these drones and aerial drones are purposely designed to look like video game controllers because it lowers the learning curve for everybody who’s grown up playing video games. Cline just takes that concept much further and adds a futuristic version of the Oculus Rift to the concept.
“I saw the sequel to Top Gun is going to focus on drone pilots because that’s where the military is heading,” said Cline. “And I’ve played VR space combat games like EVE Valkyrie and Star Citizen and even at this early stage those experiences are very realistic.”
Although Cline is writing the screenplay for the Armada feature film, which Universal Pictures is making, gamers won’t have to wait until that movie to play a game. Cline hired a game developer to create one of the fictional retro games that’s in the book. It’s a throwback to the old Star Wars space combat games with the vector graphics. Readers of the book will discover the location of the online game hidden within the text. Cline previously hired this developer to create a retro Atari 2600 style game, called Stacks, which was featured in Ready Player One. But this time around, he’s not doing a contest or giving away a DeLorean. (He owns one of those classic cars from Back to the Future, as you can tell from his photo.)
Cline would also like to see a big budget online game developed for the Armada movie. The film sets up a perfect tie-in for a video game. The author remembers how disappointed he was when he saw The Last Starfighter and realized there was no video game. He believes that’s one of the biggest missed opportunities in the history of video games. So it’s not something he’d like to replicate when fans step out of the theater after watching Armada.
“It’s such a natural thing when you play video games to imagine that all of your hard-won video game skills actually had real world value, and that was the fantasy behind The Last Starfighter and also Star Wars,” said Cline. “So many early video games like Defender, Asteroids, and Space Invaders were all inspired by those battle sequences in Star Wars.”
And now battle sequences from Cline’s own pages are inspiring big screen movies and video games. Things have come full circle for the author, who’s made good on all of those hours he spent playing every video game console that’s ever come out.
