Welcome to the Ready Player One Replay!
In honor of the November 2020 release of Ready Player Two, and Nuketown is re-reading the original novel … and replaying all of the games mentioned in it (or at least, all of the games we could find). The replay is inspired by Tor.com’s re-reads of series like The Wheel of Time and re-watches of Star Trek series like The Next Generation.
The replay is a great opportunity to revisit classic video games, many of which we haven’t played in years (or decades). Others are games we never played (or even heard of). Where possible, we’ll link out to emulators where you can play the games yourself, as well as links to reviews and commentary about the game. And, of course, we’ll include our high scores.
The original plan was to review a game a day until the new book came out, but that proved impossible. Ready Player One overflows with 1980s pop culture references and the sheer number of games mentioned, plus limits on our time, mean this is going to be a more slow-moving, gradual project. Hopefully, it’ll be a fun one as well.
| Game | High Score |
|---|---|
| Adventure | N/A |
| Galaga | 20,830 |
| Defender | 7,500 |
| Asteroids | 7,760 |
| Robotron: 2084 | 23,000 |
| Dungeons & Dragons | N/A. This is D&D … there is no high score. |
| Contra | 65,000 |
| Golden Axe | N/A (that said, I beat the game multiple times) |
| Heavy Barrel | |
| Smash TV | 1,936,990 |
| Ikari Warriors | |
| Tron – Deadly Discs | 2,170 |
| Swordquest | N/A |
| Akalabeth | Made it to Level 3, then starved to death. |
| Zaxxon | 2,750 |
| Tomb of Horrors | N/A |
| Joust | |
| Street Fighter II | |
| Dungeons of Daggorath | |
| and many, many more… |
