The Arcades Project. A new novel builds a video-game shrine to the past

摘要

IF PRERELEASE LITERARY HYPE WERE AN arcade game, Ernest Cline would be entering his initials next to the new high score. His first novel, the sci-fi thriller Ready Player One, sold for six figures last year, and its film rights were snapped up the next day. Amazon and Publishers Weekly have raved; Mark Frauenfelder of the influential alt-culture site Boing Boing called it "the best science fiction novel I've read in a decade."Though Cline's book is a debut, the buzz around it is acutely nostalgic, not unlike the sound of a misinserted Atari cartridge. As its title suggests, Ready Player One is immersed in the wave of video games that began with Zork and Pac-Man in 1980—even though its narrator, Wade Watts, is a teenager in the grim, gray mid-America of 2045. He lives in a trailer park where mobile homes are stacked dozens of levels high, and his dream is to inherit the late zillionaire fames Halliday's fortune by becoming the first person to conquer the ultimate video game: a puzzle whose solution demands deep knowledge of the nerd culture of Halliday's '80s childhood, the golden afternoon of Real Genius and the Dungeon Master's Guide and Max Headroom.