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.
Level I represents the first phase of this replay, beginning in November 2020 and ending in March 2022. Level II began in March 2022 and is ongoing.
| Game | High Score |
|---|---|
| Level I | |
| 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 | 5,570 |
| Street Fighter II | I didn’t make it past the first round. |
| Dungeons of Daggorath | I died. Early and often. |
| Level II | |
| Combat | I blew up my son’s tank. A lot. And then he did the same to me. A lot. |
| Space Invaders | |
| Pitfall | |
| Kaboom! | |
| Star Raiders | |
| The Empire Strikes Back | |
| Starmaster | |
| Yars’ Revenge | |
| E.T. | |
| Raaka-tu | |
| Bedlam | |
| Pyramid | |
| Madness and the Minotaur | |
| Star Wars Arcade (1983) | |
| Battlezone | |
| Tennis for Two | |
| Spacewar! | |
| Donkey Kong | |
| Pac-Man | |
| Dig Dug | |
| Zork | |
| Colossal Cave | |
| Time Pilot | |
| Q*Bert | |
| Gorf |
