Ernest Cline, the author of the science fiction novel Ready Player One, is quick to identify himself as a proud member of geek culture, and like any other geek, he's willing to go to extremes to satisfy his interests in classic video games and 80's retro-cool. Still, the fact that Cline commissioned the creation of an entirely new, retro-styled Atari 2600 game to promote the paperback edition of his book should put him somewhere near the top of the geekdom echelon.

That game, The Stacks, is the first part of a three stage online scavenger hunt to win a DMC Delorean that Cline purchased on eBay (yes, that's the car model made famous by the film Back to the Future). To even find the game, which is playable online, hunters have to uncover a secret website URL hidden in the pages of the book. Finishing the game, which mimics the difficulty of a true old-school Atari 2600 adventure, unlocks access to the second online challenge, which will in turn open up a third challenge that will launch on August 1. Only players that complete all three challenges will have a chance to win the car.

Cline's Easter Egg Hunt runs parallel to a similar scavenger hunt in the book, which takes place in a virtual world that dominates a dystopic version of the year 2044. When the creator of that virtual world dies, he leaves his vast fortune to the first player who can find three keys hidden amidst challenges that require intimate knowledge of '80s pop culture, including mastery of a certain classic arcade game. Ars OpenForum member BitPoet called the book "a mashup of video games, 1980s references, virtual reality, all centered around the hunt for an eccentric billionaire's fortune. Lots of fun, if you're a geek and lived through the 80s."

"I’m all about geeking out and following my inner nerd," Cline told Ars Technica. "With Ready Player One I wanted to tell the story with nothing between me and the audience, and see what would happened if I geeked out as much with no one telling me how to do it.” Cline said.

That "geeking out" spirit was in abundance when Cline used his own personal funds to commission Other Ocean Interactive's creation of The Stacks, which was designed to mimic a classic Atari 2600 game in every way possible. The game is available as a downloadable ROM that can run on the STELLA emulator, as well as on actual Atari cartridges being produced with the team at Atari Age, complete with an instruction manual. "I always wanted to make that game if it would ever be possible," Cline said. "Holding this Atari game in my hand—the circle is now complete."

In the game, your character jumps trailers and avoids meth addicts, scenes inspired by sections of the book that take place in shipping-container slums known as "the stacks." The main character In the novel says he considers learning how to code his own Atari game as a rite of passage, a sentiment shared by the real world makers of The Stacks. "Atari is a rite of passage for most engineers," Other Ocean Chief Creative Officer Mike Mika told Ars Technica. "Some of the best engineers today have the most difficult time developing games for the hardware. I dabbled with Atari before, but I never built a game from scratch. I had been dying to build one of these."

For The Stacks, Mika and Other Ocean Senior Engineer Kevin Wilson sought to make a character that could match the elegant animation of Pitfall's Pitfall Harry. Mika was thrilled to have the opportunity to meet legendary Pitfall designer David Crane for some pointers. "I asked Crane, 'how did you get so much to happen in a single line of code so we could get a single resolution sprite,'" Mika recalls. "And Crane remembered everything like it was yesterday—how to construct code and how to get the effects we wanted to get."

"I remember getting the chills off a little picture that he sent in his camera phone," Cline said of the first time he saw what the Other Ocean crew had created. "There’s the character, I thought."

Besides Pitfall and Adventure, the Other Ocean team said they were also inspired by less successful Atari 2600 titles like Raiders of the Lost Ark, a puzzle-rich exploration game that wasn't quite as successful as those other titles. "[Raiders designer] Howard Scott Warshaw only had six weeks to make that game, and he did quite a bit in those six weeks," Mika said. "And there were some glitches left in there, that people would watch for hours, and hope that it would lead to something."

Mika said he found something inspiring in that tale of development on a short deadline. "If you have any idea to make a game you can get it up and running so fast," he said. "Just get it up, play it and refine it that way. Finish it."