Ready Player One pop-culture references in a chronology

During the development of ChronoLines, I needed a chronology to test the applicaton’s functionalities. I also wanted to create a first chronology which could be uploaded to the cloud shared library, so that users can download something to work with after installing chronoLines. With these ideas in my mind, I began to think about the criteria that this first chronology had to meet.

  • It had to be something interesting and funny at the same time for a wide public. Although ChronoLines has been created keeping in mind historical chronologies, I wanted something that didn’t look too technical for this first chronology.
  • It should have a finite number of related events. I wanted to avoid an overly general issue.
  • It should be possible to classify those events in categories.
  • It had to be a chronology with enough events to test the scalability of the application.

After thinking for some time I decided that it would be interesting to make a chronology with all the pop-culture references appeared in Ready Player One novel written by Ernest Cline.

Ready Player One pop-culture references

Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel that takes place in a dystopia in 2044, and details the adventures of Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game called OASIS. The novel is full of references to video games, films and TV series mainly from 1980s and 1990s. That was the time when personal computers started to be common in homes, and science fiction movies like Star Wars filled movie theaters. The time when kids queued up in front of arcade games, and Steven Spielberg became famous with Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park. A time that is today more commented than ever thanks to TV series like Stranger Things.

The references appeared in the novel have been classified in the following categories:

  • Films & TV: 151 references including films, TV shows and famous directors.
  • Games: 59 references including video games and also tabletop role-playing games.
  • Music: 26 references including songs and rock bands.
  • Books: 28 references including writers and magazines.
  • Technolgy: 26 references including old computers and technological advances.

A film adaptation of Ready Player One novel, directed by Steven Spielberg, was released in 2018. I want to clarify that the chronology contains only cultural references appeared in the novel, and that these references differ from the ones appeared in the Spielberg’s film.

If you are interested on viewing the chronology or even collaborate to extend it with new data, you have to install ChronoLines app from Google Play, and then follow the instructions described in the video below to download the chronology and open it with the app.

Get it on Google Play

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