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 subscribe to some sort of service and then play around in an AR/VR environment populated by your favorite Ghostbuster or Star Wars character.
Appropriately, the first IP to be inducted into the Readyverse’s interactive hellscape will be Ready Player One. According to a press release, Readyverse Studios has partnered with Warner Bros. Discovery to “exclusively bring the Ready Player One franchise to the metaverse across web3.” Additional “brands and franchises joining The Readyverse will be announced soon,” it adds.
In short: The guy who wrote a book that arguably warned us about the dangers of getting lost in the metaverse is now busy creating one. For all intents and purposes, this is a perfect example of what has been dubbed the “torment nexus”—a trend whereby futurists write books warning us about the dangers of certain technological ideas, only to have hapless, money-crazed tech entrepreneurs (*cough, cough* Elon Musk) misread the book and try to create the very thing it warned about. The only difference here is that Cline appears to have done this all by himself, sans any craven tech billionaire.
“The future has arrived even more quickly than I imagined,” Cline said, in Thursday’s press release. “With Readyverse Studios, we have the opportunity to leverage the revolutionary technology Futureverse has been building for several years to bring to life the best possible version of the metaverse. I’m confident with this team, we have the brightest minds and biggest hearts in place to lead us into the next chapter of our collective future.”
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? I’m holding out for that.