A Ready Player One battle royale game was announced earlier this week. Developed by Walker Labs and published by Readyverse Studios, the game is called Open, and the companies behind it are describing it as a "multi-biome, multi-IP, multi-mode battle royale experience." It isn't a horrible idea. The problem is, a Ready Player One battle royale game already exists. It's been one of the most popular games in the world for years.

I'm talking, of course, about Fortnite. Though Fortnite isn't branded with the Ready Player One IP, Ready Player One has never been the most valuable IP in and of itself. It's just the paper bag around a really expensive bottle of whiskey. Or, to be more precise, the paper bag around dozens of really expensive bottles of whiskey clinking together as Epic carries them along.

"Gunter" is an important term in the Ready Player One universe. It's short for "Egg Hunter" and refers to the players searching the OASIS for the treasure left behind by its creator, James Halliday: a golden Easter egg. Okay, now that we're all on the same page about this, we're ready for the next paragraph.

Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One movie and Ernest Cline's novel are both loaded with IP. The book has Wade Watts gunting in WarGames, and the movie has the virtual hero gunting in The Shining, arriving just in time for the elevator to let loose a tsunami of blood. He plays a perfect game of Pac-Man in the book and battles alongside Tracer and the Iron Giant in the film. The book came out when I was in high school, so I had a soft spot for its IP-loaded world for a while. But even by the time the movie came out, Ready Player One’s fantasy world was getting closer to reality. The film hit theaters in 2018, early in Fortnite’s reign and before the game was fully inundated with IP. Six years later, a typical Fortnite match is only different from Ready Player One’s climactic battle in presentation. Spielberg and ILM can cook up something better looking than me twiddling the right stick, but the content is the same.

I won’t say that nobody cares about Wade Watts, because if paying attention to fandom has taught me anything, it’s that there is always someone out there who cares very deeply about something most people don’t. But, I do think it’s true to say that most people were more invested in the idea of Ready Player One — a virtual reality world where the most dedicated users are devoted to digging up nostalgic bits of ‘80s pop culture — than they ever were the characters. I liked that stuff when I first read the book, but I was most interested in the non-Oasis stuff, specifically, Wade’s home in the Stacks, a vertical Oklahoma City village made by stacking mobile homes on top of each other like LEGOs. That was the draw for me, but the focus of the book and movie, and the thing that everyone remembers about Ready Player One, is the Oasis and its orgy of IP.

But it’s 2024. We’ve had Fortnite and PUBG for seven years, plus branded crossovers in Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Mortal Kombat, and many more of the biggest games in the world. The Ready Player One license is not enough to draw players away from those games. It may be pitched as a metaverse, but we already have plenty of those. It's not necessarily that a Ready Player One game is a bad idea. It's that we already have the exact thing that is being promised here — a multi-biome, multi-IP, multi-mode battle royale experience. Unless Walker Labs and Readyverse have a really compelling vision we haven't seen yet, we've played this game before.

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