Wade Watts quotes

View Quote My name’s Wade Watts. My dad picked that name because it sounded like a superhero’s alter-ego, like Peter Parker or Bruce Banner, but he died when I was a kid, my mom too, and I ended up here. Sitting here in my tiny corner of nowhere, there’s nowhere left to go. Nowhere, except The Oasis. A whole virtual universe. People come to The Oasis for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be. It’s the only place that feels like I mean anything.

View Quote I was born in 2027, after the corn syrup droughts, after the bandwidth riots, after people stopped trying to fix problems and just tried to outlive them. My parents, they didn't make it through those times, so I live here in Columbus, Ohio with my aunt Alice. In 2045, Columbus is the fastest growing city in the world. It's where Halliday and Morrow started Gregarious Games.

View Quote These days, reality is a bummer. Everyone's looking for a way to escape, and that's why Halliday, that's why he was such a hero to us. He showed us that we could go somewhere without going anywhere at all. You don't need a destination when you're running on an omnidirectional treadmill with quadraphonic pressure-sensitive underlay. James Halliday saw the future, and then he built it. He gave us a place to go, a place called the Oasis.

View Quote This is the Oasis. It's a place where the limits of reality are your own imagination. You can do anything, go anywhere. Like the Vacation Planet. Surf a 50-foot monster wave in Hawaii, you can ski down the Pyramids, you can climb Mount Everest with Batman. Check out this place. It's a casino the size of a planet! You can lose your money there, you can get married, you can get divorced, you can...you can go in there. People come to the Oasis for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be: tall, beautiful, scary, a different sex, a different species, live action, cartoon, it's all your call. Yeah, that's me...well, that's my avatar, at least until I feel like changing it. Except for eating, sleeping and bathroom breaks, whatever people want to do, they do it in the Oasis. And since everyone is here, this is where we meet each other. This is where we make friends.

View Quote Planet Doom. The most dangerous place in the Oasis...and a pretty great place to pick up coins. Figures Aech would be there. Aech is my best friend in the Oasis. He's my best friend, period, even though I've never actually met him in the real world.

View Quote Artefacts. Those were key. Halliday made sure the Oasis was littered with enough randomly powerful stuff, that anyone could win if they had the skills. Death matches and artefact hunts are a good way to coin snatch, but depending on your level of armour, they're risky. You see, everyone starts the same, but the more coins you make, the more you level up. If you get killed, your avatar can come back to life, but you lose all your stuff. Everything you've ever worked for. All your money, your clothes, your weapons... Since people spend most of their time in the Oasis, losing your shit means...well, losing your shit.

View Quote The Oasis was the brainchild of James Halliday. He and his partner, Ogden Morrow, released the first Oasis build in 2025. It was an instant success, and it made them both very rich. But Morrow was out of the picture after a few years. And Halliday, he wasn't just the owner of the world's biggest company; he was like a god. People loved him. They worshipped him as much as his creation. And then, on January 7, 2040...he died. What he left behind changed everything.

View Quote The challenge is to find three keys, but in five years, no one has even got one key, and the big scoreboard, still empty. Some long-forgotten Gunter cracked the first clue and found the first challenge, then this portal appeared. But the challenge to find the first key was a race designed by Halliday that was so hard, no one had ever finished it. The only ones still trying are the Gunters – as in "egg hunters" – like me and Sho and Daito and my best friend Aech. Oh, and of course, the Sixers. The Sixers work for IOI – Innovative Online Industries. They're the second largest company in the world, with desires on becoming the first, which is why they're putting everything they've got into winning Halliday's contest. We call them Sixers because that's the company rule – no name, just numbers. They have a support team made up of Halliday scholars. Like me, they spend all their time studying pop culture that Halliday was obsessed with, trying to find clues to solve the contest. They're just following the orders of the head of IOI, this dickweed named Nolan Sorrento.

View Quote [reading the second clue] A creator who hated his own creation. A hidden key, a leap not taken. Retrace your steps, escape your past and the key will be yours at last.

View Quote [last lines] The High Five took over the Oasis, and the first thing we did was sign Ogden Morrow to a non-exclusive consultancy. The salary, per his demand, was 25 cents, one quarter. With his guidance, our second move was to ban any Loyalty Centers from accessing the Oasis. IOI had no choice. They shut them all down. The third thing we did wasn't as popular. We closed the Oasis on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I know it sounds like a weird move, but people need to spend more time in the real world, because like Halliday said, reality is the only thing that's real.

View Quote First to the key! (Aech: First to the Egg!)