Ready Player One begins with an ordinary boy competing in a video game contest created by genius James Haliday, but by the film’s end, he begins to wonder, is Haliday really ᴅᴇᴀᴅ? Wade Watts is a poor teen from the year 2024 who spends most of his time in the OASIS, a VR world created by genius James Halliday. Following Halliday’s death, an automatic announcement was released to all OASIS users explaining that the man hid an Easter Egg within his virtual world, and whoever found it would inherit his millions—and the OASIS itself.

Wade/Parzival becomes one of the many “Gunters” who devote their lives to searching for the Egg, hoping to find it before Noal Sorrento and the evil corporation IOI. To achieve this goal, Parzival and his friends must become experts in Halliday’s life to find three keys that will lead them to the contest’s end. Since Halliday created the Easter Egg hunt in Ready Player One after learning of his terminal illness, he hoped the contest winner would learn valuable lessons he himself learned too late, and that’s precisely what happened.

What Halliday’s Three Keys Really Mean

The Race, The Shining, and Play Adventure

Halliday was a closed-off man in his early years awkward and disinterested in the full ramifications of his creation, while later in life, lonely and regretful. As such, the quest was made after he learned of his imminent death as a way to find a suitable successor. He’s not looking for the best player per se, but someone with the “traits” worthy of ruling the OASIS. As he says in his own eulogy, the keys can only be found by going into his mind – which he handily created as a physical library – so, while the tasks necessary have some genuine challenge to them, each represents something more.

First, for the Copper Key, is the race, a pop culture onslaught one can only win by reversing backward through the course. The clue to finding the challenge is found before the movie starts, but Wade still needs to use knowledge of Halliday—he hated rules—to find the memory where the creator and Ogden Morrow begin to schism, and he makes a point of wanting to “go backward.” It’s about thinking outside the box, applying greater truths, and not being afraid to admit mistakes.

The second task, for the Jade Key, comes from a clue at the end of the race, alluding to a “creator that hates his creation” and a “leap not taken.” Parzival and Art3mis try various permutations of this building from what they perceive to be Halliday’s biggest regret—his failed date with Karen Underwood. Eventually, they realize the key is hidden within the movie Halliday and Karen watched when she wanted to go dancing: The Shining which Stephen King famously despised. To get their hands on the key, they had to correct Halliday’s mistake by asking an NPC version of Karen to dance.

IOI quickly figures out from here that the “fortress tragic” in the previous clue is Halliday-avatar Anorak’s castle on gaming Planet Doom, where an Atari 2600 is set up. The catch here is that retrieving the Crystal Key didn’t depend on winning any games. Instead, the player needed to play Adventure, believed to be the first video game in which the developer hid an Easter Egg. Once Parzival found developer Warren Robinett’s hidden feature (his name), the key was his, proving that it’s not about winning but taking a moment to enjoy the little things.

Ultimately, Halliday’s tasks weren’t really about the pop culture references that permeate them but teaching lessons that the OASIS creator deemed important—admit to mistakes, learn from them, and understand that it’s the journey that’s important. As each of Halliday’s three keys taught the players of his game to do these things better than the creator had himself, they are being prepared for the final test of Ready Player One‘s Easter Egg hunt.

The Final Test & Halliday’s Easter Egg

Getting All Three Keys Didn’t Mean The End Of Parzival’s Journey

After gaining the three keys, Wade doesn’t win straight away. Instead, he’s taken to an ornate room with the Easter Egg at its center, where Anorak offers him a contract for the OASIS. This, of course, looks like victory, but in light of the lessons from the previous challenges, it is clearly another test. Wade is being offered the exact same deal Halliday took, but to sign would be undermining how he got to that point of the compeтιтion to begin with. By declining to sign Anorak’s contract, Parzival proved that he deserved to win.

After refusing to sign the contract, Wade discovers Halliday’s true purpose and is given the real Easter Egg, a symbol of his journey so beautiful it bleeds into the real world (via a high-tech VR suit), stunning hero and villain alike. Some version of Halliday (a mystery we’ll get back to) reveals that he had made the OASIS to immerse himself in his pop-culture obsessions and connect with others who shared his pᴀssions. However, since this virtual reality wasn’t real, it couldn’t replace genuine connection.

This is solidified by Ogden Morrow. Throughout the movie, the High Five is led to believe that Kira and the missed opportunity at romance was Halliday’s defining regret, and while it certainly weighed heavily on him, that’s not the Rosebud at the center of the story. The broken friendship with “Og,” caused by their conflicting goals for the OASIS, left him alone and with no human connection. Halliday’s entire contest in Ready Player One was to preach against that and ensure his eventual successor would not lose sight of those around them.

What Happens To The Oasis?

Wade Takes Control Of The VR World

At the end of Ready Player One, Wade—like any Spielberg protagonist—gets the girl, which in this story represents his taking steps to be better than Halliday. Of course, he still does get control of the OASIS, and here’s where he makes the essential, autonomous decision to share control with the rest of his “clan,” the High Five. He’s gone from literally naming himself after the Knight who tried to find the Holy Grail solo to understanding the value of friendship and support—exactly what Halliday wanted.

The Five move to make the OASIS more harmonic and a force for good in the real world rather than just an escape from it. To ensure it remained this way, the decision was made that the OASIS would be closed on Tuesdays and Thursdays, thus forcing the population to take the time to make real and meaningful connections in the real world. Ultimately, this served as another step in correcting Halliday’s mistakes.

What Happens To IOI?

Wade Makes Moves To Shut The Company Down

The other big company in 2045 is IOI, whose products are so ubiquitous they’re even used by those who oppose them. Their full scale isn’t shown on screen, with most time spent on Samantha’s stint in the Loyalty division, where those who owe significant debts to IOI are forced to do labor to pay it off. Then, of course, there are the Sixers, employees of IOI who aim to hunt down Halliday’s Easter Egg so that the villainous company can take control of and monetize the OASIS, making it no longer accessible to most of the population.

One of Wade’s biggest rulings at the end was locking out Loyalty Centers from the OASIS, a move that essentially shut the entire division down. Additionally, since Wade and the rest had significant proof that Nolan Sorrento had attempted to murder them IRL, it can be ᴀssumed that, like in the Ready Player One book, the villain ended up in prison. In the novel, IOI was forced to shut down after Wade and the rest of the High Five stripped away its highest profit points, but this is never confirmed to be the case in the movie.

Is Halliday “Alive”?

Halliday’s Autonomous NPC In Ready Player One Seemed To Hint That The Genius Wasn’t Really ᴅᴇᴀᴅ

At the end of Ready Player One, Wade asks Halliday if he is really ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. The version of the man seen during the final test in the Easter Egg hunt certainly seems to be fully autonomous, and this has confused audiences just as much as Wade. Halliday refrained from answering whether he was alive or not, instead giving Wade a knowing look and thanking him for playing his game. This itself seems to imply that Halliday is more than just an NPC, and the Ready Player One book series confirms this.

In Earnest Cline’s Ready Player One book, Wade never doubted that the version of Halliday inside the OASIS was an advanced NPC created by the man himself. Therefore, the question the character posed about whether Halliday was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ never happened. However, in the book’s sequel, Ready Player Two, it is revealed that Halliday invented technology allowing a person to upload their mind to the OASIS, creating a perfect AI replica of themselves that could live eternally. Halliday’s body was, in fact, ᴅᴇᴀᴅ; his mind lived on in the OASIS.

Pages: 1 2