Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

When I stepped through the portal, I didn’t find myself inside a videogame, or in a historical simulation of feudal Japan. Instead, I found myself standing in a place I’d visited once before—years ago, during the contest. Happytime Pizza. The original Happytime Pizza was a small mom-and-pop pizza parlor and video arcade that had existed in Middletown, Ohio, from 1981 to 1989. Halliday had spent countless hours there during his youth, and he’d re-created it in loving detail inside the OASIS, along with the rest of his hometown, on the planet he’d named after it. But during the contest I’d discovered another instance of Happytime Pizza, hidden in the subterranean videogame museum on the planet Archaide. That was where I’d played my perfect game of Pac-Man and earned the extra life quarter that allowed me to survive the detonation of the Cataclyst on Chthonia. Given my previous visits to Happytime Pizza, my surroundings should have felt familiar. But it was the opposite, because this time, I was wearing the ONI. This time, I could smell the tomato sauce and burnt pepperoni grease in the air. I could feel the subtle vibration of the sound system’s speakers through the floorboards, pulsing in time with the bass line as they blasted the song “Obsession” by Animotion. This time, I felt like I was really here, like I’d genuinely traveled back in time to Middletown, Ohio, sometime in the late 1980s.

Happytime Pizza was divided into two halves, the game room and the dining room. But actually they were both game rooms, because all of the tables in the dining room were sit-down cocktail videogame cabinets.

Will this matter? Update: it won’t

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the two-way mirror adjacent to the manager’s office. I did an involuntary double take. I was no longer my avatar, Parzival. Now I was Kira Underwood, when she was in her late teens, instantly recognizable from the handful of photographs taken of her during her time in Middletown in the late ’80s. I had her adorable pixie haircut, her giant designer prescription eyeglasses (with clip-on, flip-up mirrored sunglasses), and her trademark acid-washed jean jacket, adorned with countless patches, buttons, and pins. I glanced down and took a quick inventory. I also had Kira’s boobs, and her hips, lips, fingertips—all of it. I even pulled my right sleeve to check the back of my forearm and there it was—Kira’s tiny birthmark. The one that distinctly resembled a map of Iceland. I didn’t just look like her. I was her.

It was my first indication that this one was set in a more recent time period than the others—probably somewhere in the fall or winter of 1988 or the spring of ’89, when Kira Underwood had lived in Middletown. About two dozen videogames were packed into the game room, with about a dozen NPCs spread among them. They were all teenage boys in late-’80s attire, each one standing at a different game. They all had their backs to me, and they continued to keep them that way as I walked past them. As I made my way to the back of the game room, I spotted the familiar Defender marquee, with the same handwritten note taped to it that I’d seen on my last visit: Beat the owner’s high score and win a free large pizza! But most of the other games I remembered seeing in the Archaide instance of Happytime Pizza had now been replaced with newer titles. Pac-Man, Galaga, and Dig Dug had been swapped out with Golden Axe, Final Fight—and way at the back, what appeared to be a brand-new Sega Ninja cabinet.

Author spends three paragraphs telling us that we’re in a later version of the pizza arcade and that it looks like (shock and awe!) the late 80s.

walking over to the Sega Ninja cabinet to size up my opponent. Its illuminated marquee had the word NINJA printed on it in large stylized yellow and orange letters, with the smaller SEGA logo underneath it. But on the monitor, the title appeared as SEGA NINJA.

Imagine Huck Finn discussing the font choices of like a bounty poster. “The word ‘Wanted’ was printed in all capitol, black letters along the top of the page. It was a serif font, but I didn’t know exactly which one. Just below that, the name ‘Jim’ had been printed with a different letter size, slightly smaller than the first, but larger than the rest of the description at the bottom of the page, below a crude sketch of the man who had saved my life. It reminded me of a cowboy story, because it was just the kind of thing the scrappy protagonist would find nailed to a wall in one of those dusty sheriff’s offices. But now I was the scrappy protagonist.” Mark Twain really missed his chance at literary greatness by not including something like that.

and a brief-but-beautiful piece of 8-bit animation, which showed Princess Kurumi being carried across a bamboo bridge on a palanquin by two masked ninja thugs. In the distance, beyond fields of red roses and forests of cherry-blossom trees, over a broad blue river, you could see the purple-roofed Kanten Castle, perched high in the clouds, atop a gorgeously rendered snowcapped mountain range that filled the distant horizon. Suddenly, Kurumi leaped out of the palanquin, wearing a fancy red Queen Amidala gown. Then, in a puff of ninja smoke, she changed into more battle-ready attire—a red silk kunoichi—and chased after her former captors, presumably to murder them just offscreen.

I looked up this screen, and it is nowhere near as beautiful as Wade seems to find it.

I removed my clip-on mirror shades and hung them on top of the game’s marquee. This allowed me to use their lenses as rearview mirrors, providing a wide-angle view of everything behind me. This was a trick I’d learned from Art3mis, during one of our early online pseudo-dates on Archaide.

sounding deeply amused.

“You’ve never played Ninja Princess before, have you?” Aech asked. I sighed. It sounded like Kira Underwood was the one sighing. “Yes, I have,” I replied. “But only once or twice. Six or seven years ago.”

Cline couldn’t even let Wade have a game he’d never touched before, so he just makes it one Wade hasn’t played in a while

The game began with a brief animation, showing Princess Kurumi changing out of a fancy silk kimono into her red kunoichi garb, as the poorly translated message PRINCESS’ES ADVENTURE STARTS is typed out above her, one letter at a time. Then a familiar warning appeared in the center of the screen: PLAYER 1 START, followed by a rectangular map of the kingdom showing my current position at the bottom, and the route I would have to follow to reach Kanten Castle. Then the first level or “step” of the game appeared—a sprawling green meadow, covered in patches of colorful flowers and strewn with the occasional tree or giant boulder. My tiny pixelated avatar appeared at the bottom center of the screen, and in that instant I was back in the zone. I wasn’t Kira Morrow, or Parzival, or Wade Watts. The controls became an extension of myself, and I became the vengeful Princess Kurumi, clad in blood-red silk and armed with an infinite supply of throwing knives, intent on reclaiming my stolen kingdom at any cost.

Were the video game sections of the first book also this painful, and I was just paying less attention because it was an audiobook?

Ninja Princess, aka Sega Ninja, turned out to be much more challenging than I anticipated. But once I got a feel for the controls and the gameplay, I was rockin’ like Dokken—especially

a giant boomerang-like weapon.

Not a boomerang, but it is boomerang-like

by clearing the first level, I’d moved slightly closer to the castle at the top. Then the next level began.

Imagine me, reading this line, skimming through the next two pages, and realizing that yes, we are going to step through every single level of this game one by one

It was a truly great game, and it was also kicking my ass.

As I played, I noticed something odd about the music playing on the arcade’s jukebox. The same three songs kept playing, over and over. “Obsession” by Animotion, then “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, followed by “My Best Friend’s Girl” by the Cars. It was easy to see the connection. All of these songs could’ve been about Halliday’s obsession with Kira—his best friend’s girl. And, I realized, I could be reliving the moment his obsession began.

This is a book with no subtext, all text

At some point, a small crowd of onlookers began to form around me—the NPCs who’d been playing on the other machines, I assumed. And the longer I played, the bigger the crowd sounded. I didn’t turn around to do a head count, but I caught brief, warped glimpses of them in the lenses of my mirror shades, during the pause in gameplay at the end of each level, when my score and hit count was tallied and I was given a brief view of my progress toward the castle on the map.

Ninja Princess was a strangely nonviolent action game. There was no blood or gore in it at all. Or killing. When Princess Kurumi got hit, she would just fall down and cry. The Puma Ninja clan members and bosses didn’t collapse and die when they were dispatched. They just vanished in a puff of smoke. When I asked Shoto about it, he told me it was a conscious choice by the game’s creators, to promote pacifism and nonviolence.

Sorry, what? But fighting them is still violent, and definitely not pacifistic at all. And earlier, Wade mentioned that the princess ran offscreen to probably murder her captors.

“Wow,” Aech said. “A nonviolent game about killing people with knives. Genius.”

See, Aech gets it

And then I finally made it back into Kanten Castle—my former home, now overrun with usurping Pastel Ninja dipshits.

I lunged forward into the final boss battle, with Aech and Shoto both shouting advice in my ear and cheering me on, like my own personal Mickey Goldmill and Paulie Pennino.

I’d failed to recall this obscure piece of trivia until I saw it in front of me. But my predecessor had not.

Impossible! That’s not the Wade I know.

That was when I realized I was looking at Ogden Morrow’s score. Which made perfect sense. Og had completed this challenge earlier today. Just a few hours ago. And judging by his score, he was much better at Ninja Princess than I would ever be. Either that, or he’d kept on playing after he beat the final level and the game started over at the beginning again, to rack up those extra points.

No subtext! Not allowed!

Then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and nearly jumped out of my skin.

Well, at least he’s calmer than earlier in this scene, when he actually did jump out of his skin. So the tap on the shoulder was surprising, but not as surprising as when he heard Shoto and Aech over voice chat for the first time.

Og looked like he was around sixteen years old. About the same age he was when he met Kira for the first time—at a local arcade, when she moved to Middletown in the summer of 1988. No wonder this setting and the scenario I was acting out both felt so familiar. I’d read about it seven or eight years earlier, in Ogden Morrow’s bestselling autobiography, Og.

Cline is the kind of author who probably liked it when Solo: A Star Wars Story finally showed us how Han Solo got his last name

Og’s recollections were infuriatingly vague when it came to details,

But Og had never bothered to specify which local arcade it was, or the name of the game Kira had played, and other written accounts had given conflicting information about both. Now I knew he’d met Kira here at Happytime Pizza. And that the game he’d watched her beat with one quarter was Sega Ninja, aka Ninja Princess.

I was reenacting the moment Ogden and Kira Morrow first met.

We know!

Halliday was attempting to cock-block him. This shocked and amused Og, because he’d never seen him display jealousy over a girl before. Just computer hardware.

“I’m Og. And you—you’re amazing! I can’t believe you defeated Sega Ninja on one quarter! This is the first time any of us have ever seen anyone do that. Way to go!”

And so the romance of the century began

I high-fived him. He looked extremely relieved when I did.

“Thanks, Og,” I heard myself say, with Kira’s voice, and in her British accent.

Og gave the Sega Ninja cabinet an awkward pat, as if it were an unfamiliar Labrador.

right on cue, another extremely familiar-looking teenage boy interrupted our conversation. I immediately recognized him as James Halliday—at age seventeen. Wearing his half-inch-thick horn-rimmed eyeglasses, a pair of faded jeans, worn Nikes, and one of his beloved Space Invaders T-shirts.

The Happytime Pizza game room was gone, replaced by a throne room that looked an awful lot like a live-action version of the 8-bit one in the final stage of Ninja Princess.

Did it have throne-like chairs?

“ ‘Reclaim her castle and face her imposter,’ ” Shoto recited. “This is it! Kick his ass, Princess!” I nodded, then lunged forward and did as Shoto instructed—I kicked Kazamaru’s ass.

Og did all of this in 10 minutes, but the speedruns of Ninja Princess I just looked up were in the half-hour range. Plus he had to solve the puzzle to know where to look, teleport to the right world, relive the post-game meeting with himself and Halliday, and fight the bonus boss.

The last sliver of his life bar turned red—but he didn’t die. Instead, the manly, black-clad ninja master abruptly fell to his knees and began to cry, then vanished in a cloud of smoke a few seconds later.

Og had written about this moment in his autobiography, too, I realized. But he hadn’t described it in any detail, or given the time and place it occurred.

I held out both of my fists and they each bumped one of them and silently nodded.

“Hold on!” Shoto said, cutting her off. He’d opened a browser window in front of his avatar and was reading from it. “Andie MacDowell also starred in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan in 1984. But the director hired Glenn Close to loop all of her dialogue, because he didn’t like her Southern accent! Do you think that could be what ‘recast the foul, restore his ending’ is a reference to? Maybe that film had an alternate ending….” “Wait, are we talking about the movie where Connor MacLeod plays Tarzan?” Aech said. “Directed by the cat who made Chariots of Fire?”

I don’t think I need to provide context to explain how dumb this reads

The differences were subtle, but no Sim—at least not as far as I’d experienced, and I’d tried thousands—had just the mix of strangeness, uncertainty, and intensity that came from a recording of a real-life moment.

“Andie Walsh!” I shouted. “With an i-e! That was the name of Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink.” Aech and Shoto both groaned and rolled their eyes.

“Pretty in Pink originally had a different ending,” I replied. “One where Andie ended up with Duckie, instead of with Blane. Arty—Samantha—posted an essay about it on Arty’s Missives a long time ago.” “Of course she did,” Aech said.

She grinned, admiring our old-school gunter attire. Then she snapped her fingers and spun around in a circle. Her avatar’s outfit was replaced by the scaled gunmetal-blue armor she’d worn during the contest, along with her twin blaster pistols in their low-slung quickdraw holsters, and a long, curved Elven sword in an ornate Mithril scabbard was now strapped to her back. She’d even donned her fingerless Road Warrior–style racing gloves. Seeing her dressed like that again brought back a flood of old feelings and long-suppressed memories. They left me feeling momentarily lightheaded. And weak-hearted.

“So if Kira is the ‘Siren,’ and the Seven Shards are ‘fragments’ of her ‘Soul,’ what does Anorak assume will happen when we put those pieces back together? When we ‘once again make the Siren whole’?” Art3mis looked back over at me. “Holy shit, Wade,” she muttered. “You don’t think…?” I nodded.

Wade puts the pieces together about 150 pages after the reader did

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Art3mis muttered, shaking her head. “The first two challenges required you to possess detailed knowledge of the Smiths and Ninja Princess?”

Arty is the audience-surrogate for a brief moment

James Donovan Halliday was a brilliant videogame designer and programmer. But he didn’t know anything about women—especially Kira. There’s no way he could’ve convincingly re-created one of her memories, from her perspective. He was a self-obsessed sociopath, incapable of feeling empathy for anyone else. Especially Kira…” I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from leaping to Halliday’s defense. The man had been far from perfect, but he’d given us our entire world. “Sociopath” didn’t just seem harsh, but downright blasphemous.

“If you’re right…this is some extremely twisted shit we’ve gotten ourselves mixed up in, fam.”

Art3mis’s smile vanished. She replaced it with a fiercely competitive scowl that I recognized from the days of Halliday’s contest. She called this “putting her game face on.”

As we arrived, a song I recognized from my Hughes research began playing—the opening of Kirsty MacColl’s cover of “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” from the She’s Having a Baby soundtrack.

As we cut through the adjacent parking lot, we passed two NPCs—a young man and woman—in the midst of a passionate kiss. When they came up for air, we could see that the young man was Kevin Bacon, dressed in a gray business suit, and that the young woman he’d been kissing was Elizabeth McGovern. I recognized them as Jake and Kristy Briggs, the two main characters in She’s Having a Baby, Hughes’s most autobiographical film. Jake kissed his wife goodbye one more time, then turned and sprinted off to make the train. Across the street from the station, we passed the church where the wedding from Sixteen Candles took place. Just beyond it, I spotted a familiar neon billboard that said WELCOME TO SHERMER, ILLINOIS—ONE OF AMERICA’S TOWNS! POPULATION 31,286. But Art3mis led us in the opposite direction, onto Shermer Road, which led farther into town.