Zitat des Tages von Ernest Cline:
I notice when I'm at a party where I don't know anybody - even if I have nothing in common with somebody - we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.
I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.
I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them.
'Fanboys' was the first real screenplay that I ever wrote that was an original story with my own characters.
I still tell people, 'I'm pretty sure I'm the only 'Star Wars' fan in history to ever break into Skywalker Ranch by writing a movie about breaking into Skywalker Ranch.'
Growing up in rural Ohio, I knew my way around a double-wide pretty well.
For the whole history of cinema, we've been experiencing movies and television through a two-dimensional, letterboxed window. But once you can start programming entertainment for all the different senses, it becomes a wholly different medium.
I don't even think I was quite a year old. My mother was maybe seven months pregnant with my little brother. I was sucked out of her arms, and she landed 75 yards away from our trailer and had a ruptured disc. The tornado set me down on top of this pile of corrugated lumber and scrap metal.
I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.
Once the people of planet Earth are all hanging out together online in a virtual world without any borders, I think it could change social networking, entertainment and even politics.
Before I became a full-time writer, I worked in tech support in those giant cubicle farms you see. I was surrounded by people who played video games all the time - sometimes actually in the call centers, playing online multiplayer games. I saw friends of mine who began to feel that going online was more compelling to them than real life.
I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.
I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1's 'I Love the '80s' gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation.
Personally, I'm kind of swirling in this hurricane of virtual reality because of 'Ready Player One.'
I don't know if the '80s were unique, but we certainly got original, groundbreaking stuff at the time with movies like 'Back to the Future' and 'Star Wars' - movies that became classics.
I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.
Now, a lot of early VR worlds or universes that are coming online take inspiration from 'Ready Player One.' It's just the coolest thing ever.
My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.
I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.
Everything you could ever want to happen happened to me when 'Ready Player One' came out.
I'm surprised that VR has come about so quickly. It's lucky I just happened to write a book imagining virtual reality right on the cusp of it actually happening.
What's really astounding to me is a lot of the guys at Oculus VR and other companies who were creating VR tell me that 'Ready Player One' is one of their primary inspirations in getting into virtual reality.
