Nolan, Spielberg, and the Battle for Ready Player One

It is an adage for the modern age: nobody likes watching someone else play video games. And yet, for most of the duration of Ernest Cline's geektastic cult novel, Ready Player One, we do just that. It is a sign of our modern times powered by simulation and the internet that the book spent much of its early life as a New York Times best seller. The story is exciting, complex, and rich in detail as we follow the story of Wade Watts, a lonely teenager in the near future who lives most of his life inside the OASIS, a vast virtual-reality network into which most of the world is logged in. Wade, under the screen name 'Parzival', is just one of the millions of people across the world engaged in a quest to gain control of the OASIS and its infinite expanse and power, a quest left by the network's late creator James Halliday, a reclusive Steve Jobs/Howard Hughes billionaire who has woven a series of 'Easter eggs' into the OASIS for players to find. What ensues is a fantastic adventure-quest for the arcade and iPad generations, but only for them, as gaming makes up such an integral part of the novel that it would be difficult to understand without some knowledge of recent gaming and technological history.

The film rights for Ready Player One were obtained by Warner Bros. a year before the novel's publication. Having first read it when it was rumoured that Interstellar's Christopher Nolan would be directing the adaptation, it was easy for me to see how the director would simultaneously handle the vast scale of both the novel's real world and it's virtual one, while at the same time incorporating the great detail which makes up every scene. The director has never had any trouble mixing the epic and the intimate, and so could have easily handled such an expansive work. Having helmed the most recent trilogy of Batman films, Nolan also has at least some experience of appeasing nerdy fans, who will no doubt scan every shot of the film for misrepresentations of their favourite movies or games.

However, despite his more than adequate credentials, it is not to be, as it was recently announced that Steven Spielberg had signed on to direct. Following completion of The BFG, Spielberg will be returning to Warner Bros. for the first time since A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. As a filmmaker whose scale of production arguably exceeds Nolan's, it will be interesting to see how the director will interpret the novel, and the project may be a historical first as Spielberg prepares to adapt for the screen a book which mentions him by name, as one of OASIS creator Halliday's favourite filmmakers. While I was disappointed at the departure of Nolan, it is clear that the novel lends itself almost entirely to Spielberg, from his creative signatures to his intrinsic place in popular culture. The clues to the egg's location are based on Halliday's obsession with the eighties of his childhood, from Dungeons & Dragons to the Commodore 64 and John Hughes. Spielberg will essentially be making a film which worships his heyday of some of cinema's biggest home runs and the tastes which inspired them. Look out for the film's new title: Steven Spielberg was Amazing in the Eighties, by Steven Spielberg.