Ready Player One is essential reading for all fans of retro gaming, as the novel from Ernest Cline serves as a homage to many of the great titles that led to the sprawling industry that exists today. For those who don’t want to read, there’s also the Steven Spielberg adaptation, which was released in 2018.
The OASIS that Cline envisioned is what many people believe Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse will look like. The main question is whether the author’s ideas about the integration of retro games will come to fruition.
The OASIS that Cline envisioned is what many people believe Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse will look like. The main question is whether the author’s ideas about the integration of retro games will come to fruition.
Retro Games Engrained in Modern Gaming
Looking at the current state of the gaming industry, it would be wise to assume that retro games will still exist within any future developments in the technology. Rather than fall by the wayside as gaming has advanced, the classics that started it all have found new ways to stay relevant. Many of the top titles back in the 1980s are still well-known and popular among today’s audiences. Tetris, for example, has been ported to a whopping 65 different platforms and has been downloaded more than 132 million times as a mobile app.
Retro games are kept alive across all genres of gaming, with developers in the online casino industry often paying tribute to the games that came before the internet. Studios often like to offer games as a homage to more simpler times, as these can fill players with feelings of nostalgia. Retro Tapes is one game that combines classic arcades with music from the old days. The game has an RTP of 96.47 percent, and the meaning of RTP is the theoretical return to player. This is what players can expect to see as an average return when they play for a certain length of time.
The fact that new RTP is being combined with old-school themes highlights how modern and retro games can join forces and move forward together, which is why classic titles will most certainly be available in the metaverse.
Cline Envisioned Two Ways to Integrate Old School Games
The concept of the metaverse is still mysterious, and right now we can only speculate what it will look like. However, it would be reasonable to assume that it won’t look too dissimilar to the OASIS. Within Cline’s idea of a VR universe in which everyone in the world can do virtually anything, there were two main ways that retro themes were integrated.
The first was in the avatars that players used when people explored the vast sandbox. Many people chose to use characters from the old days of gaming to reminisce. The other key vision that Cline had was that retro machines would still exist within the VR metaverse. In one of the most important parts of the book, the protagonist finds a classic game of Pac-Man and manages to complete it with a perfect score. The idea of having fixed machines within places in the metaverse is easily something that could catch on.
When the metaverse gets fully going in the 2030s, people may look back on Ready Player One as a prescient text and put it in the same bracket as offerings like 1984. There is a strong chance that the author’s vision of retro games will come to being in this new VR world.
