The movie is full of Easter eggs (Picture: WB)

It was with much disappointment that Ready Player One fans discovered that Wil Wheaton – fan boy favourite and Ernest Cline’s vice-president of the OASIS – would allegedly not have a cameo in the movie.

He made the claims at AwesomeCon in 2017, suggesting he would not appear in the movie and leaving it with, ‘and, believe me, no one is more disappointed than I am’.

Well, cut to release of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation and it turns out that Wheaton was telling porky pies because production designer Adam Stockhausen has confirmed that Wheaton is in the film.

Wil Wheaton is in the film (Picture: WireImage)

‘There are all sorts of tiny pieces and parts,’ he says of the many, many Easter eggs in the movie.




‘It gave us so much pleasure to be grabbing not just big obvious things – like the DeLorean – but also little things where you have to do a double take. For instance, in Aech’s basement there is a poster from Back To The Future – in the film Marty sees an election poster for Goldie Wilson who is running for mayor – so we grabbed that and put it in the film.

‘But then we took it a step further and in the book Wil Wheaton is a politician in the OASIS and so we talked to Wil and said, “can we take your picture and insert you in this poster,” and so we have Wil’s campaign poster based entirely on the Wilson poster.’

Stockhausen adds: ‘We have lots of little fun Easter eggs like that – the whole nature of the contest in Ready Player One is finding Easter eggs in video games so it’s really an open invitation to fill it up with as many eggs as you can and we tried to.’

Ready Player One was Stockhausen’s first film where his work as a production designer was mostly done in the post-production stage.

‘[The OASIS] was entirely animated, the sets I designed the same way as the real world sets – starting with sketches and building it up from there – but it is a different process because you don’t build it with nails and wood and paint, you build it on the computer, so it starts the same with research and ideas and sketches and it takes a different path,’ he reveals.

‘When you build a set, you get ready for the production team to turn up to set and you’re giving notes and developing and realising “oh that chair needs to go over there and oh we painted that too bright we need to age it down”, but those all happened, exactly the same, just in post-production when it’s been shot.

‘I have certainly done films with visual effect components but that’s always been set extension and augmentation – in Bridge Of Spies we did that with the Berlin wall – but this is the first time it’s been a virtual world.’

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And as for how many Easter eggs Stockhausen thinks may be in the final film?



‘Oh god I really don’t know, I never counted,’ he says.

‘We had a policy where we said to everybody as we were working, “keep your eyes open and if you can see a spot to use something please do”. [For example, the development of the New York race challenge, as those streets were being locked in, I would say “do you remember anything from an 80s film about New York City?” and we can jam it in.’

Ready Player One is releasing to UK Cinemas on Thursday 29 March.

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