Ready Player One: Sword Art Online: [ Novel (LitRPG) / Cartoon (Anime) | Cyberpunk / Thriller ]
Backstory:
In the 1980s, the Cartels in Central America instigated a rise in violence that eventually spilled over onto American soil. There have been rumors that a joint operation by the ATF and CIA was behind this. This caused the United States to become heavily involved in a major conflict, resulting in a significant economic collapse. This collapse led to a military coup and resulted in the rise of the European Common Market and Japan as superpowers, while in contrast, the Soviet Union managed to pull itself back from the brink of collapse.
Driven by these changes is the development of orbital habitats who, with the aid of the newly risen megacorporations that have gained immense power at unprecedented levels, develop into their own independent states. As the megacorporations vie for power amongst themselves, determined to control every scrap of wealth known to man, the world has experienced other disasters, such as devastating famines caused by food blights. By the late 1990s, a conflict in the Middle East sees a global collapse of the agricultural and energy markets following a nuclear conflict, initiating an international crisis as the world's food basket has caught fire alongside of its oil fields.
As a result of all the chaos, bioengineering has advanced rapidly, driving the development of cybernetic prosthetics and direct human-machine interfaces, amidst a backdrop of ongoing warfare; in the US of A, the lack of government oversight and police intervention as a direct result of the Central American Wars, casual violence consistently breaks out at unprecedented, endemic levels across the country. With many of its returning veterans suffering from various forms of "technoshock", an inability to cope with a world of synthetic muscle tissue, organic circuits, and designer drugs, most are left unable to live peaceful and prosperous lives, creating an immense need for escapism.
Responding to these needs in 2020, the recently rebranded Gregarious Simulation Systems (formerly Gregarious Games) offers an opportunity, a solution for that need following the launch of their flagship virtual reality videogame console, the OASIS, created by their co-founder, James Halliday, and accessible by players through the use of visors and haptic technology. People immediately embrace the new technology, using the OASIS as an escape hatch for the utter dismality that is their everyday lives, utterly changing the socio-political landscape almost overnight as they use, what was essentially a space almost exclusively used for VRMMORPGs into a fully developed virtual world, with the OASIS' currency becoming one of the most stable currencies recognized at the international level. This success creates an automatic monopoly over the rest of the market, utterly
crushing the majority of their completion.
Among the many suffering as a result of this is game developer Akihiko Kayaba, whose company, Argus, was Gregarious Games largest international competitor, and whose work on the NerveGear was theoretically the only comparable product on the market, given its release was not slated for another
decade. As a result of this, Kayaba is pressured by his parent company, The Arasaka Corporation, to deliver his game much
farther ahead of schedule than had originally been planned, being absolutely outraged that their efforts on the console and the game had gone to waste after being outperformed by the
Americans. With the project accelerated beyond
all reasonable measures, Kayaba is slowly driven to the edge, and
far past it, as he is driven to increasingly desperate measures to save his life's passion in creating the setting of Aincrad that ultimately culminate in a fit of psychosis brought on by stress, sleep deprivation and no small amount of excessive stimulant usage, that causes both the console
and its flagship game becoming a
true Death Game, a virtual gladiator match that holds its every player hostage as the result of an immense coding error. Left with no other option, Kayaba takes drastic (if ill-advised) measures to save face.
On August 20th, 2024, 0000 JST,
Sword Art Online is released as a console exclusive VRMMORPG to the Arasaka line of OASIS haptic consoles, the NerveGear, to an opening of 50K+ players as part of its gamma testing. At 0017 JST, the first reports of the missing logout button is reported to game staff. At 0047 all active online players (250K+ and counting) are summoned to the Starting Town's Central Square, followed shortly by Kayaba's announcement about the start of the Death Game, and panic ensues.
Book 1: Sword Art Online:
While the outside world scrambles to free a number of VIPs trapped in the game, inside the game the player Kirito, real name Kazuto Kirigaya, takes to the revelation in a rather...unhealthy way, determined to make it alone. Already the archetypical Jerkass with a buried Heart of Gold, his previous role as a alpha/beta-tester sees him rise to the rather coveted position as one of the best players in the whole game, everything some manner of terrible joke with an even worse punchline for him. And then, as everything else, this game he only bought into because he was having fun, takes a few turns for the worse, leaving him with only one goal: Survival.
Book 2: Gunter Online: (WIP)
Wade Watts [Parzival] as MC
Book 3: Elfline Online: (WIP)
Suguha Kirigaya [Leafa] as MC
Book 4: Call of Duty Online: (WIP)
Karen Kohiruimaki [Ren] as MC
Book 5: DataKrash: (WIP)
Ensemble Cast (Above) creates a Netrunner Society, the final event culminating in Bartmoss' DataKrash attack.
