Ready Player Two, the highly anticipated sequel to Ernest Cline’s worldwide best-selling book Ready Player One, debuts in the U.S. and U.K. on November 24. In a partnership, Roblox is launching a themed treasure hunt with seven user-generated games based on the book inside the Roblox platform.
It’s one more example of the plans to bring about the metaverse (or in the setting of Ready Player One, the Oasis), the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Cline’s book. Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki will speak at the GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse event on January 27.
The collaboration should generate a lot of attention, as the science fiction book is likely to be the biggest fiction book of 2020. And it comes just after Roblox disclosed its filing for an initial public offering on the stock market that could value the user-generated game company at $8 billion.
Those players who complete the treasure hunt will be awarded virtual goods designed specifically for the Ready Player Two and Roblox event.
The event will feature a virtual Q&A with Cline and Baszucki. The Q&A will stream inside the Ready Player Two Event beginning December 1 at 10 a.m. Pacific.
The Q&A will include clues for navigating the treasure hunt. In addition to the Q&A, users can find clues by reading Ready Player Two in advance of the event’s December 1 start.
The Ready Player Two and Roblox event is open to the global Roblox community of more than 150 million users. In 2018, Roblox and Warner Bros. collaborated on an event around the release of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster adaptation of Ready Player One, and over 13 million people actively engaged with the event on the Roblox platform.
Baszucki said in a statement that it’s fair to say this event is going to be even bigger. The Ready Player Two Event space in Roblox is officially open for fans to hang out in anticipation of the event’s start, and over a million Roblox users visited the space in the first 24 hours. Free Ready Player Two-themed merchandise is available to all those who visit the space for a limited time.
Cline said in a statement, “Roblox is the closest thing to the Oasis in real life, and this contest is the closest thing to the treasure hunt in my book.”
The original title came out in 2011, and it imagined a near-future where the world endured a pandemic and was in a severe economic depression, leaving humanity to escape an inhospitable real world for the safety of a virtual one. (Yes, the pandemic part feels familiar.) The prescient novel spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and Steven Spielberg made a movie based on it.
In Ready Player Two, Cline takes readers on a new adventure through his virtual universe, the Oasis.
