Prologue and Level One: Chapters 1-5 Summary

In the 1980s when Atari began selling games for their home gaming consoles, they did not allow game programmers to have credit for their creations. Hence, the game programmer who created the Atari game, Adventure, created a hidden key within the game that revealed his name when it was discovered and taken to a special secret room. This came to be called an Easter Egg. In this novel, the creator of the OASIS virtual universe created his own egg and the first person to find it will inherit his entire estate and control of his company, including OASIS.

In the Prologue, James Halliday, a brilliant game programmer, grew up in the 1980s and grew obsessed with this era as he aged. Halliday, an introvert who often had trouble speaking to people, was a...