ERNEST CLINE

I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.'

I notice when I'm at a party where I don't know anybody - even if I have nothing in common with somebody - we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.

I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.

I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1's 'I Love the '80s' gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation.

I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.

I've wanted to own a DeLorean since I was 10 years old, but it always seemed like a silly daydream. Like owning the 'A-Team' van or something.

Before I became a full-time writer, I worked in tech support in those giant cubicle farms you see. I was surrounded by people who played video games all the time - sometimes actually in the call centers, playing online multiplayer games. I saw friends of mine who began to feel that going online was more compelling to them than real life.

I don't know if the '80s were unique, but we certainly got original, groundbreaking stuff at the time with movies like 'Back to the Future' and 'Star Wars' - movies that became classics.

My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.

Once the people of planet Earth are all hanging out together online in a virtual world without any borders, I think it could change social networking, entertainment and even politics.

I think it's a bit silly to brand the Internet as the 'downfall of youth.'

I'm incredibly nostalgic for the '80s, because I think that's when Geek Culture really kicked in to high gear.

I was 7 years old when the '80s began and 17 years old when they ended, so it was an incredibly formative decade for me.

I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them.

I don't even think I was quite a year old. My mother was maybe seven months pregnant with my little brother. I was sucked out of her arms, and she landed 75 yards away from our trailer and had a ruptured disc. The tornado set me down on top of this pile of corrugated lumber and scrap metal.

Gibson wrote 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter, you know, before the technology he was writing about existed.

Everything you could ever want to happen happened to me when 'Ready Player One' came out.

'Star Wars' was the mythology of my youth. I longed for adventure.

Personally, I'm kind of swirling in this hurricane of virtual reality because of 'Ready Player One.'

I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.

I have such a vivid memory of seeing science fiction movies and going to the lobby and playing whatever the space games were, and imagine I was blowing up the Death Star.

'Fanboys' was the first real screenplay that I ever wrote that was an original story with my own characters.

It's weird that, in a way, by writing about video games, I get to develop them, too.

When you're hanging out with your friends, you reference books and movies, and you don't always know if your friends know what you're referencing. But you throw it out there, and if it connects, it makes people laugh.

In a zombie apocalypse movie, nobody's ever seen a zombie movie. Or in an alien invasion movie, nobody has ever seen an alien invasion movie, like 'Independence Day.'