You guys are not "Book" readers or very often RTFM.
Ready Player One is a science fiction novel by Ernest Cline.
The year is 2044 and the world is in near-ruins. The Great Recession has taken its toll on the world's economy, and resources are scarce. The Internet and gaming culture have evolved into a creation known as OASIS, a massive multiplayer online simulation game created by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow of Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS), formerly known as Gregarious Games.
Halliday, with no heirs or other living family, dies suddenly and leaves a video will to those in OASIS and a book that was dubbed Anorak's Almanac, which purports to be a volume written by James Halliday's avatar Anorak in OASIS. The video says that whomever can collect three keys (Copper, Jade, and Crystal) that are hidden throughout the universe of OASIS and pass through the matching gates will receive his fortune and controlling stake in GSS. This becomes known as the Hunt and people immediately begin the search for Halliday's "egg," a reference to the first "Easter egg" in video game culture in the game Adventure.
The First "Easter Egg" in gaming:
In 1980, Atari programmer Warren Robinett set about making a video game version of the original text Adventure. In the depths of the black castle in Games 2 and 3, which required special tools, direction, and a certain amount of know-how, players could maneuver to a room by the catacombs that had a single-pixel gray dot, the same color as the game's background. The dot would allow players access through a wall to a superfluous area with the text "Created by Warren Robinett" running down the middle. Robinett was partially motivated by the fact that, at the time, designers weren't given credit for their games.
And so he claimed his own. Given the size of Atari games, this little screen ate a substantial portion of the memory (at around 5 percent), although Robinett has claimed that he created it only after the game was finished. Reprinting the cartridge without this screen would have proved to be too costly for Atari, and given the relative obscurity of the egg, it was left in for all future printings. These days, Adventure is almost as notorious for fathering the first Easter egg as it is for its innovations in action adventure gameplay.
