Have you ever wanted to be a part of a Steven Spielberg movie? Well, thanks to a new contest, you can get in on the Spielbergian fun, even if you’re not named Harrison Ford or Tom Hanks.
Spielberg’s next film, Ready Player One, takes place in a future where people spend most of their time in an ’80s-inspired virtual world named OASIS. Of course, no virtual world is complete without some sort of goal, and OASIS contains a series of puzzles that will grant untold power and riches to whoever solves them. A teenager named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) solves the first puzzle, but quickly discovers that people are willing to do very bad things to crack the puzzles before him. Welcome to the world of online gaming.
Ready Player One will be split between the “real world” and OASIS, where Tye Sheridan and co-stars Olivia Cooke and Simon Pegg will be represented by animated avatars. Of course, OASIS will also be filled with countless other avatars, and that’s where the contest comes in. Warner Bros. is looking for digital artists to create original avatars, which will appear somewhere in Ready Player One if selected. There are no limits on the number of possible winners. You can check out a video of Ernest Cline, the original author of Ready Player One, talking up the the contest, above.
Now the fine print – if your avatar is selected, you have to turn over all rights to the character in exchange for $1,000. You could argue that’s exploitative, but it’s not like Steven Spielberg and his legions of effects people couldn’t create their own avatars. I really don’t think this is a case of Spielberg and Warner Bros. trying to outsource work. And hey, a lot of these kind of contests don’t play anything at all, so a grand isn’t bad.
If you want to get in on the contest, you can do so by clicking right here. If an eagle-winged, three-headed, farting Nicolas Cage avatar shows up in Ready Player One, feel free to send me congratulations on my win.