To celebrate the release of Ready Player One in paperback, I’m giving away a 1981 Delorean! Details at: bit.ly/Ku0YQn #readyplayerone
— Ernie Cline (@erniecline) June 5, 2012
With this tweet, Ernie Cline, the author of the celebrated geek culture book Ready Player One launched a competition that mirrors the one in his book.
In the book, residents of a virtual world were given the chance to win vast power and riches by finding clues and completing a series of challenges. In our real-world competition, the prize is a little more modest, but if you grew up in the 80s and love 80s geek culture, a DeLorean is still a pretty sweet prize.
In order to get yourself started on the path to the prize, you’ll have to a have a physical copy of the book; the clue is buried inside the pages, and unfortunately that leaves out those of us who have the book in either ebook or audiobook format.
@ldodds The way ebooks are formatted prevented me from hiding the easter egg in electronic editions. But I bet you can guess the URL easy…
— Ernie Cline (@erniecline) June 10, 2012
At the time of this writing, more than 100 people have cleared the first “gate,” so there’s no telling how long it’ll be until someone claims victory. However, there’s no immediate rush, as Cline’s video (included below) explains.
Are you going to set yourself on the path to winning? Tell us about your journey in the comments!