The Author of Ready Player One Has Launched His Own Torment Nexus

Ernest Cline, the bestselling author of Ready Player One, apparently never learned the lesson of his own book. The novelist—whose sci-fi hit depicts a dystopian world in which people forego societal engagement for the illusory pleasures of a Matrix-like video game world—has decided to launch his own “metaverse” platform that will be used to recycle profitable pop culture IP slop and sell it back to hapless nostalgia gooners.

Cline has teamed up with Dan Farah, the producer of the Spielberg-directed film adaptation of his book, as well as a metaverse company, Futureverse, to launch a new company that sounds like quite possibly the worst thing ever. The company, Readyverse Studios, will launch the “Readyverse,” described by its creators as a “dynamic interactive platform of interconnected digital experiences.” Those “experiences” will be informed by IP culled from various franchises—meaning that, eventually, it sounds like you’ll be able to pay a subscription and then play around in an AR/VR environment populated by your favorite Ghostbuster, kaiju, or Star Wars character.

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More than anything, the Readyverse seems like the natural endpoint for the entertainment industry’s insufferable “IP” obsession. Studios have long insisted on treating beloved movie franchises as little more than video games, haplessly resurrecting and rebooting them with little concern for what were once the foundational elements of cinema (i.e., narrative and characters). It only makes sense that the next step would be to take the lifeless husks of those story worlds and dump them into an interactive environment where consumers can engage with them directly without any need to make a movie at all.

Personally, I’m going to hold off until the IP integrations get really weird. When will the Readyverse have Eraserhead and Heaven’s Gate gameplay enabled? Somebody call me when that happens.

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