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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
ISBN 978-0-307-88743-6
eISBN 978-0-307-88745-0
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First Edition
I read every issue of every comic book title Halliday had ever collected.
I wasn’t going to have anyone questioning my commitment.
Especially when it came to the videogames.
Videogames were my area of expertise.
My double-weapon specialization.
My dream Jeopardy! category.
I downloaded every game mentioned or referenced in the Almanac,
from Akalabeth to Zaxxon. I played each title until I had mastered it, then
moved on to the next one.
You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have
no life whatsoever. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of study
time.
I worked my way through every videogame genre and platform. Clas-
sic arcade coin-ops, home computer, console, and handheld. Text-based
adventures, first-person shooters, third-person RPGs. Ancient 8-, 16-, and
32-bit classics written in the previous century. The harder a game was to
beat, the more I enjoyed it. And as I played these ancient digital relics,
night after night, year after year, I discovered I had a talent for them. I
could master most action titles in a few hours, and there wasn’t an ad-
venture or role-playing game I couldn’t solve. I never needed any walk-
throughs or cheat codes. Everything just clicked. And I was even better at
the old arcade games. When I was in the zone on a high-speed classic like
Defender, I felt like a hawk in flight, or the way I thought a shark must feel
as it cruises the ocean floor. For the first time, I knew what it was to be a
natural at something. To have a gift.
But it wasn’t my research into old movies, comics, or videogames that
had yielded my first real clue. That had come while I was studying the his-
tory of old pen-and-paper role-playing games.
...
Reprinted on the first page of Anorak’s Almanac were the four rhyming
lines of verse Halliday had recited in the Invitation video.
Other gunters had also discovered this hidden message, of course, but
they were all wise enough to keep it to themselves. For a while, anyway.
About six months after I discovered the hidden message, this loudmouth
MIT freshman found it too. His name was Steven Pendergast, and he de-
cided to get his fifteen minutes of fame by sharing his “discovery” with the
media. The newsfeeds broadcast interviews with this moron for a month,
even though he didn’t have the first clue about the message’s meaning. After
that, going public with a clue became known as “pulling a Pendergast.”
Once the message became public knowledge, gunters nicknamed it
“the Limerick.” The entire world had known about it for almost four years
now, but no one seemed to understand its true meaning, and the Copper
Key still had yet to be found.
I knew Halliday had frequently used similar riddles in many of his
early adventure games, and each of those riddles had made sense in the
context of its game. So I devoted an entire section of my grail diary to
deciphering the Limerick, line by line.
The Copper Key awaits explorers
This line seemed pretty straightforward. No hidden meaning that I
could detect.
In a tomb filled with horrors.
This line was trickier. Taken at face value, it seemed to say that the key
was hidden in a tomb somewhere, one filled with horrifying stuff. But
then, during the course of my research, I discovered an old Dungeons &
Dragons supplement called Tomb of Horrors, which had been published in
1978. From the moment I saw the title, I was certain the second line of the
Limerick was a reference to it. Halliday and Morrow had played Advanced
Dungeons & Dragons all through high school, along with several other
pen-and-paper role-playing games, like GURPS, Champions, Car Wars,
and Rolemaster.
Tomb of Horrors was a thin booklet called a “module.” It contained de-
tailed maps and room-by-room descriptions of an underground labyrinth
infested with undead monsters. D&D players could explore the labyrinth
with their characters as the dungeon master read from the module and
guided them through the story it contained, describing everything they
saw and encountered along the way.
As I learned more about how these early role-playing games worked,
I realized that a D&D module was the primitive equivalent of a quest in
the OASIS. And D&D characters were just like avatars. In a way, these old
role-playing games had been the first virtual-reality simulations, created
long before computers were powerful enough to do the job. In those days,
if you wanted to escape to another world, you had to create it yourself,
using your brain, some paper, pencils, dice, and a few rule books. This
realization kind of blew my mind. It changed my whole perspective on the
Hunt for Halliday’s Easter egg. From then on, I began to think of the Hunt
as an elaborate D&D module. And Halliday was obviously the dungeon
master, even if he was now controlling the game from beyond the grave.
I found a digital copy of the sixty-seven-year-old Tomb of Horrors
module buried deep in an ancient FTP archive. As I studied it, I began to
develop a theory: Somewhere in the OASIS, Halliday had re-created the
Tomb of Horrors, and he’d hidden the Copper Key inside it.
I spent the next few months studying the module and memorizing all
of its maps and room descriptions, in anticipation of the day I would fi-
nally figure out where it was located. But that was the rub: The Limerick
didn’t appear to give any hint as to where Halliday had hidden the damn
thing. The only clue seemed to be “you have much to learn if you hope to
earn a place among the high scorers.”
I recited those words over and over in my head until I wanted to howl in
frustration. Much to learn. Yeah, OK, fine. I have much to learn about what?
There were literally thousands of worlds in the OASIS, and Halliday
could have hidden his re-creation of the Tomb of Horrors on any one of
them. Searching every planet, one by one, would take forever. Even if I’d
had the means to do so.
A planet named Gygax in Sector Two seemed like the obvious place to
start looking. Halliday had coded the planet himself, and he’d named it
after Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons and the au-
thor of the original Tomb of Horrors module. According to Gunterpedia (a
gunter wiki), the planet Gygax was covered with re-creations of old D&D
modules, but Tomb of Horrors was not one of them. There didn’t appear
to be a re-creation of the tomb on any of the other D&D-themed worlds
in the OASIS either. Gunters had turned all of those planets upside down
and scoured every square inch of their surfaces. Had a re-creation of the
Tomb of Horrors been hidden on one of them, it would have been found
and logged long ago.
So the tomb had to be hidden somewhere else. And I didn’t have the
first clue where. But I told myself that if I just kept at it and continued
doing research, I’d eventually learn what I needed to know to figure out
the tomb’s hiding place. In fact, that was probably what Halliday meant
by “you have much to learn if you hope to earn a place among the high
scorers.”
If any other gunters out there shared my interpretation of the Limerick,
so far they’d been smart enough to keep quiet about it. I’d never seen any
posts about the Tomb of Horrors on any gunter message boards. I real-
ized, of course, that this might be because my theory about the old D&D
module was completely lame and totally off base.
So I’d continued to watch and read and listen and study, preparing for
the day when I finally stumbled across the clue that would lead me to the
Copper Key.
And then it finally happened. Right while I was sitting there daydream-
ing in Latin class.