I remember when I was a kid, growing up on the games and movies of the 80s.
I remember playing Superman on my dad’s old Atari consoles, playing the Amstrad that took 20 minutes of loading off a tape so you could play impossible games like Android One, the odd much treasured outing to an arcade in Dublin to play coin operated classics like Asteroid, playing classic Sierra games on my dad’s PC like Police Quest, Space Quest, King’s Quest, Hero’s Quest, watching movies like WarGames, Back to the Future and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as well as the more obscure, more violent, more awesome stuff like Robot Jox and PuppetMaster that sat in the back of the video store, intense sounding movies with sleek looking boxes that I could only ever watch when I went to a friend’s house because my mother would never let me and plus, we had a Betamax video player anyway.
I also remember that by the time I was a teenager in the 90′s, as a matter of simple self-preservation I had learned to outwardly fucking hate the 80′s, mostly because all of the things I had learned to love in the 80′s turned out to be completely fucking uncool in my new teenaged world of 90′s fads. The Computer Games, Science Fiction and Hightop Sneakers I loved were all seen as childish, pathetic, old. Openly continuing to openly espouse an interest in these things would have been somewhat akin to going to school with my face covered in faeces. The clothes, the music, the people, the haircuts. Everything had to go.
Publicly, the 80′s were seen pragmatically as what had to happen to get past the 70′s and get on with the 90′s. They were embarrassing, uncomfortable but necessary to go through if we wanted to reach the promised heights of the new contemporary vogue. Kind of like a Brazilian Wax that lasted a decade. So, around the 90′s my inability to totally let go of the geekery I had learned to love in the 80′s was the bane of my life. With my 80s computer gaming and my 70′s hair I felt like I was 100 years old. I felt, like Marty McFly, outatime.
I couldn’t help it though, no matter how much I tried to keep it quiet I’d always come back to what I knew. I would still secretly watch and love 80′s movies I’d never seen like Ladyhawke and Enemy Mine. Everybody else liked to live as if they had been born into an ecstasy filled Mancunian warehouse or grunge filled Seattle music venue aged 15 and the proceeding years and everything they contained had never happened. I had to accept this and try to hope that no-one would notice my secret copies of Amiga Format which I read with the same kind of fervour most guys my age gave to whatever Topshelf Europorn they had stolen off their older brothers.
And then, eventually, something happened. Thank god.
The internet came along and because the anonimity factor made everyone look the same, it brought with it a lot of conversation about trivial things that people felt differentiated them from their digital peers. Many people who until then, had never had a chance to do so were given an opportunity to finally try to be themselves and an almost endless amount of time in which to do so. What they found was usually that there were a lot of people out there that were interested in the same things they were. In the digital sphere, people felt enabled to talk honestly about the things that they loved and considering the fact that most of the people who had made it that far into the sphere at the time were of the intensely unapologetic nerd variety, they were also pretty unchanged since their formative years, hence their problems acclimatizing to the real world. This meant a lot of people talking about stuff they’d loved their whole life, complete with the fervour that that comes with.
Most early internet geeks were programmers who had grown up on games and computers created in the first real consumer electronics boom in the 80′s. They had always known what they liked and they didn’t really care who knew about it. This meant that right from the beginning of the internet, because the of the interests of the programmers who actually made it, there was an underlying love of what was seen as the Golden Age of Electronics.
Eventually, as time went on and social media brought the mainstream online, more and more of the polar icecap of geek made internet culture melted and fall into the sea of the mainstream, diluting it with small elements of their love of the 80′s. Small things began coming back into force in the real world. Some clothes here from American Apparel, a remake of a movie there, a phrase or a way of speaking. People began to start talking fondly about their early childhoods, they started talking with common glee about movies and games and cartoons that they loved, games they had played. They started the first strains of the social movement that would grab an entire generation and infuse it with a kind of arms race of nostalgia.
So 80′s geekery became cool mostly based off the back of the hardcore nerds who never apologized for being nerds, yet hilariously none of them were invited to the resulting parties celebrating their honesty because they still smelled funny.
Today, my gaming habits haven’t changed. I still routinely play the same twenty 80′s adventure games on emulators on pretty much every computer I buy. My musical taste can be broadly described as liking anything that sounds like it could be an contemporary version of 80′s PC or Amiga game soundtrack. I still dress like an extra out of ET. I still play Gameboys and love Nintendo and watch The Goonies multiple times every year.
I am, now unapologetically, a child of the games and movies of the 80′s.
Which is why this book, Ready Player One, might have well have been written with me sitting on the far side of the author’s computer screen during the entire process, happily playing with a Dayglo Rubix cube while wearing a T-shirt saying “Video games ruined my life, lucky I have two extra lives”.
So, without the rambling preamble I just went through, it’s kind of hard to explain why this book is pretty much the perfect book for me. It’s as if someone spent months interviewing me, did a full and complete psychological profile costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and utilised a world wide network of supercomputers to come up with an idea for a book that would captivate me. Put simply, the book has been described as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets Tron”. It’s about a contest set in a videogame world in the future where there’s a mysterious benefactor who has set up a contest that so captivated a generation of kids that they have dedicated their entire lives to it. And what does winning this contest require?
Encyclopedic knowledge of 80′s pop culture.
The Author, Ernest Cline, has managed to write a story about the future of the 80′s, which in itself is an amazing idea. It’s page after page of futuristic sci-fi littered with hundreds of references to 80′s pop and videogame culture, each of which send a shudder of recognition down my spine. It full of the kind of stuff I have spent my life indulging guiltily in. I’m not kidding when I say that there are maybe two references in this entire book that I didn’t get immediately and had an exact mental picture of what he was talking about. This book is about the one situation where the meticulous and lifelong obsession I have had for 80′s trivia could theoretically be utilised. It’s an adventure in idyllic fanboydom written by the guy who actually wrote Fanboys. In short, he’s written a book about the best possible thing that could ever happen to me. I swear to God, if I copy and pasted the main character’s name out and put mine in, it would feel like so accurate a description of what I am like that I am somewhat worried that Ernest Cline might know something about my future I don’t. And to top it off he does drive this car:
The book is perfect. I read it in two sittings over two nights, both of which ended up running till 5AM. IF I had one criticism it’s that it should have been twice as long. The language is simple yet evocative, the characters are captivating and likable, the references awesomely chosen but the story, oh Jesus, the Story. An epic adventure story that’s like The Goonies meets The Matrix.
In fact, reading this book was like watching The Goonies for the first time.
But now.
But also like, not now? Like, when I was 10?
Cause if you watched The Goonies now and you’d never seen it, it would never be as good as it would have been if you had watched it when you were 10.
But of course if I had read this book when I was 10, I wouldn’t be able to read it for the first time now, you see the problem?
So, something about this book allowed me to feel like I was watching The Goonies now for the first time WHILE HAVING ALSO WATCHED IT FOR THE THE FIRST TIME WHEN I WAS 10.
So, reading this book was in effect like as if I was 10 while I read it.
And you know, I really don’t think I could give it higher praise than that.
If you don’t like this book that’s okay. It’s cause it wasn’t written for you.
It was written for me.
Now, I’m gonna go watch WarGames again. Leave me alone.
