Before his death, Halliday wove a mystery into the architecture of the OASIS.

Yet these are merely the frosted tips on a pop-culture iceberg.Ĭline's 2011 novel is about a virtual world called the OASIS, created by Willy Wonka-esque genius James Halliday (portrayed on screen by Mark Rylance, channelling Brent Spiner in Independence Day).

The DeLorean from Back to the Future (executive produced by Spielberg) features heavily in the finished product, alongside a T-Rex suspiciously similar to that from Jurassic Park. Spielberg's vow not to reference his own filmography would prove less than watertight. “I’m just going to leave myself out of it. I’m not putting myself in this movie…,” he had told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, when unveiled as director of Ernest Cline's science fiction bestseller. “The movie won’t have any of my films in it. The director saw the funny side – but only to a point. In the tumbledown dystopian apartment of hero Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), the props department had slipped in a battered copy of Thomas Keneally's Schindler’s Ark – the 1992 book adapted by Spielberg into Schindler’s List. Late into the filming of Ready Player One, a tatty paperback caught Steven Spielberg’s eye.

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