RPO Replay: Tron – Deadly Discs

The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote After I beat Aech at three rounds of Tron: Deadly Discs, he threw down his Intellivision controller in disgust. — Ready Player One p. 40 Game Play Tron – Deadly Discs is a single-player game for Atari 2600 and … Read more

Ready Player One Video Game Replay

A male teenager climbs up the side of a stack of mobile homes, looking off into the distance, where he sees a dystopian skyline. Cover art from the novel version of Ready Player One

Welcome to the Ready Player One Video Game Replay! Ernst Cline’s dystopian novel Ready Player One (Amazon) is set in a cyberpunk-ish future in which climate change, economic upheaval, pandemics, and other catastrophes have transformed our world. Poverty is rampant, with many people living on the fringes of big cities in the hopes of scraping … Read more

RPO Replay: Smash TV

A Smash TV contestant, surrounded by whirling blades, fends off enemies.

The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors. Game Play Smash TV is a frantic run-and-gun game inspired by the likes of Running Man … Read more

RPO Replay: Heavy Barrel

The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors. Game Play Heavy Barrel is a top-down shooter in which one- or two-players blast their way through … Read more

Golden Axe – Ready Player One Video Game Replay

The heroes of Golden Axe: A battle axe wielding dwarf, a great sword using male human, and a long sword-using female human. They stand against a brown tiled background.

Golden Axe is a side-scrolling, fantasy-based hack’n’slash video game that dominated arcades in the early 1990s. Released in 1989 by Sega, the game was one that my friends and I would happily pump quarters into until we completed its epic quest, usually laughing our asses off whenever we did something particularly dumb on screen. It … Read more

RPO Replay: Contra

The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors. Game Play Contra is a side-scrolling two-player shooter by Konami featuring two muscle-bound … Read more

RPO Replay: Robotron 2084

The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Quote I booted up my emulator and selected Robotron: 2084, one of my all-time favorite games. I’d always loved its frenetic pace and brutal simplicity. Robotron was all about instinct and reflexes. Playing old videogames never … Read more

Asteroids – Ready Player One Video Game Replay

The white, dagger-like outline of a space ship floats on a black void. White outlines of asteroids drift nearby.

Asteroids is a 2D, vector-display-based arcade game developed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg and released by Atari in November 1979. The gameplay revolves around a single spacecraft trapped in an asteroid field that attempts to survive for as long as possible by destroying any space rocks that get close. The Atari 2600 version came … Read more

RPO Replay – Defender

The Ready Player One Replay is an exploration of the games that inspired the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Source Gunfire wasn’t uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill the remaining hours until dawn by … Read more

Galaga – Ready Player One Video Game Replay

Galaga is a 1981 game programmed by Tetsu Ogawa and released by Namco. It features a single starship fending off endless waves of insectoid starships. In Ready Player One, it appears twice: first as one of the games that Wade Watt plays in his home in the Stacks; the second as part of a virtual playthrough of … Read more