Ready Player One - Ernest Cline [27]
So I remained stuck at school. I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.
After lunch, I headed to my favorite class, Advanced OASIS Studies. This was a senior-year elective where you learned about the history of the OASIS and its creators. Talk about an easy A.
For the past five years, I’d devoted all of my free time to learning as much as I possibly could about James Halliday. I’d exhaustively studied his life, accomplishments, and interests. Over a dozen different Halliday biographies had been published in the years since his death, and I’d read them all. Several documentary films had also been made about him, and I’d studied those, too. I’d studied every word Halliday had ever written, and I’d played every videogame he’d ever made. I took notes, writing down every detail I thought might be related to the Hunt. I kept everything in a notebook (which I’d started to call my “grail diary” after watching the third Indiana Jones film).
The more I’d learned about Halliday’s life, the more I’d grown to idolize him. He was a god among geeks, a nerd über-deity on the level of Gygax, Garriott, and Gates. He’d left home after high school with nothing but his wits and his imagination, and he’d used them to attain worldwide fame and amass a vast fortune. He’d created an entirely new reality that now provided an escape for most of humanity. And to top it all off, he’d turned his last will and testament into the greatest videogame contest of all time.
I spent most of my time in Advanced OASIS Studies class annoying our teacher, Mr. Ciders, by pointing out errors in our textbook and raising my hand to interject some relevant bit of Halliday trivia that I (and I alone) thought was interesting. After the first few weeks of class, Mr. Ciders had stopped calling on me unless no one else knew the answer to his question.
Today, he was reading excerpts from The Egg Man, a bestselling Halliday biography that I’d already read four times. During his lecture, I kept having to resist the urge to interrupt him and point out all of the really important details the book left out. Instead, I just made a mental note of each omission, and as Mr. Ciders began to recount the circumstances of Halliday’s childhood, I once again tried to glean whatever secrets I could from the strange way Halliday had lived his life, and from the odd clues about himself he’d chosen to leave behind.
James Donovan Halliday was born on June 12, 1972, in Middletown, Ohio. He was an only child. His father was an alcoholic machine operator and his mother was a bipolar waitress.
By all accounts, James was a bright boy, but socially inept. He had an extremely difficult time communicating with the people around him. Despite his obvious intelligence, he did poorly in school, because most of his attention was focused on computers, comic books, sci-fi and fantasy novels, movies, and above all else, videogames.
One day in junior high, Halliday was sitting alone in the cafeteria reading a Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. The game fascinated him, but he’d never actually played it, because he’d never had any friends to play it with. A boy in his class named Ogden Morrow noticed what Halliday was reading and invited him to attend one of the weekly D&D gaming sessions held at his house. There, in Morrow’s basement, Halliday was introduced to an entire group of “mega geeks” just like himself. They immediately accepted him as one of their own, and for the first time in his life, James Halliday had a circle of friends.
Ogden Morrow eventually became Halliday’s business partner, collaborator, and best friend. Many would later liken the pairing of Morrow and Halliday to that of Jobs and Wozniak or Lennon and McCartney. It was a partnership destined to alter the course