The Copper Key

The Copper Key
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
 Nicholas Stevens


In a world where everybody forgets about real life and uses VR headsets, a kid named Wade is on the hunt for Halliday’s Easter egg. Halliday is the creator of the game, “Oasis,” which is life simulator game because real life sucks for everybody. Halliday has put a secret in the game, and whoever finds it gets his entire fortune. Wade has studied every liking of Halliday in hopes of discovering his secret and to his success he finds the first clue to his secret hidden within a copy of an old D&D dungeon called The Tomb of Horrors. Wade, having the knowledge of almost every dungeon detail, manages to bypass all the traps and monsters that lurk and would likely kill his character in the dungeon. Upon reaching the boss at the end Wade for certain knows he would have to fight the boss and he knew the boss was an undead lich king which would one shot him to death, but Wade, not having much to lose, enters. When he enters he looks upon the lich sitting atop his throne lifeless. Taking another step in the room the lich awakes and instead of fighting Wade the lich challenges him to a Joust. Wade, surprised because lich’s were supposed to fight the player, he sees the lich with his skeleton hand conjure an old video cabinet with the title Joust on it and challenges Wade to a best of three. After getting demolished from the first game Wade realises that the lich was programmed to a certain skill set and would do certain moves every time, so using this knowledge Wade destroys the lich in the next two games making him the winner. Upon winning he gets the copper key which would help with the easter egg.

This chapter really hooks the reader in, but I feel that the author could have left out some detail that had nothing to do with the plot. Other than that I like how the author brings old entertainment into Halliday’s likings, “I watched every episode of The Greatest American Hero, Airwolf, The A-Team, Knight Rider, and The Muppet Show,”(Cline 63). Also I remember when I played D&D and doing the Tomb of Horrors campaign and the author definitely studied the manual when writing this chapter because of the detail of the tomb, “I held my breath as I placed the close up image from the Ludus map beside the illustration the D&D module,”(Cline 71). I got a weird but funny image when the author shows this huge undead and scary lich standing next to Wade playing on an old arcade machine,” Acererak took hold of the yellow joystick on the left side on the control panel and closed his bony fingers around it,”(Cline 80). Even though I haven’t finished the book I would recommend it to everyone because Ernest Cline uses his writing to mix old 80’s ideas with new present day ideas.