Ready Player One - Ernest Cline [112]
If I’d been hungry, I could have ordered a real slice of pizza at the counter. The order would have been forwarded to a pizza vendor near my apartment complex, the one I’d specified in my OASIS account’s food service preference settings. Then a slice would have been delivered to my door in a matter of minutes, and the cost (including tip) would have been deducted from my OASIS account balance.
As I walked into the game room, I heard a Bryan Adams song blasting out of the speakers mounted on the carpeted walls. Bryan was singing about how, everywhere he went, the kids wanted to rock. I pressed my thumb to a plate on the change machine and bought a single quarter. I scooped it out of the stainless-steel tray and headed to the back of the game room, taking in all of the simulation’s little details. I spotted a handwritten note taped to the marquee of a Defender game. It read BEAT THE OWNER’S HIGH SCORE AND WIN A FREE LARGE PIZZA!
A Robotron game was currently displaying its high-score list. Robotron allowed its all-time best player to enter an entire sentence of text beside their score instead of just their initials, and this machine’s top dog had used his precious victory space to announce that Vice-Principal Rundberg is a total douchebag!
I continued farther into the dark electronic cave and walked up to a Pac-Man machine at the very back of the room, wedged between a Galaga and a Dig Dug. The black-and-yellow cabinet was covered with chips and scratches, and the garish side-art was peeling.
The Pac-Man game’s monitor was dark, and there was an OUT OF ORDER sign taped to it. Why would Halliday include a broken game in this simulation? Was this just another atmospheric detail? Intrigued, I decided to investigate further.
I pulled the game cabinet out from the wall and saw that the power cord was unplugged. I plugged it back into the wall socket and waited for the game to boot up. It seemed to work fine.
As I was shoving the cabinet back into place, I spotted something. At the top of the game, resting on the metal brace that held the glass marquee in place, was a single quarter. The date on the coin was 1981—the year Pac-Man had been released.
I knew that back in the ’80s, placing your quarter on a game’s marquee was how you reserved the next turn on the machine. But when I tried to remove the quarter, it wouldn’t budge. Like it was welded in place.
Weird.
I slapped the OUT OF ORDER sign on the neighboring Galaga cabinet and looked at the start-up screen, which was listing off the game’s villainous ghosts: Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde. The high score at the top of the screen was 3,333,350 points.
Several things were strange about this. In the real world, Pac-Man machines didn’t save their high score if they were unplugged. And the high-score counter was supposed to flip over at 1,000,000 points. But this machine displayed a high score of 3,333,350 points—just 10 points shy of the highest Pac-Man score possible.
The only way to beat that score would be to play a perfect game.
I felt my pulse quicken. I’d uncovered something here. Some sort of Easter egg, hidden inside this old coin-op videogame. It wasn’t the Easter egg. Just an Easter egg. Some sort of challenge or puzzle, one I was almost certain had been created and placed here by Halliday. I didn’t know if it had anything to do with the Jade Key. It might not be related to the egg at all. But there was only one way to find out.
I would have to play a perfect game of Pac-Man.
This was no easy feat. You had to play all 256 levels perfectly, all the way up to the final split-screen. And you had to eat every single dot, energizer, fruit, and ghost possible along the way, without ever losing a single life. Less than twenty perfect games had been documented in the game’s