Really? I've done that on pretty much every single racing game I've ever played, just as a bit of fun. Not sure what the time frame was before Wade did it but they made out it had been a long time and I have trouble buying that it wouldn't have been done sooner.
Also, why don't more people have the big trucks that Wade's friend had? Clearly looked to be an advantage in such a race, as opposed to the much smaller vulnerable cars.
There may have been people who reversed for fun, but I don’t think they would have plowed through that wall illusion even if they did.
shareSo what are you saying, they have to believe in it first for it to work?
shareNo, just that someone going in reverse would likely stop before they hit that holographic wall because they wouldn’t know it wasn’t a solid wall. Don’t people lose all their coins if they die in the Oasis.
shareI can't remember now what the entry level for that race was, but I can still imagine someone with not a lot of money being silly enough to do it (many of them die in the first few seconds anyway), or someone doing it by accident, or just someone thinking that that's the solution sooner than it took Wade to eventually figure out.
sharePretty sure there was no "entry level" other than you needed your own car.
That would defeat the whole purpose of Halliday's game being for everyone
Mostly playing devil's advocate here because I agree with you for the most part:
The fact that crashing costs you all your "stuff" might give pause to ordinary players.
The "sixxers" have less to lose, but have less creativity as well.
The movie mentions this in passing, but players are only allowed one avatar per person, so it's not like you could create a "disposable" avatar to try things out.
Presumably people who care enough to race also care enough about the OASIS to have run up a lot of "stuff" they don't want to lose.
HOWEVER ... as soon as players "die" in the very first race, their next avatars have literally nothing to lose.
In the very next race, I'd expect to see players doing crazy stuff like car-surfing, running on foot and ESPECIALLY driving backwards into walls.
After all, here in "real life," GTA players jump cars onto jets, defeat dragons in Skyrim using only their fists, rack up giant killscores in multiplayer Call of Duty using only knives, etc. etc.
So maybe if the race had been running for at most a few weeks, I could believe no one had tried going full blast backwards ... yet. But not five years.
As for the "big trucks," those are the kind of things only experienced players can buy or build.
Oh one last thing occurred to me, but the movie doesn’t actually support this theory
Maybe you can only use the backwards “cheat” after your avatar has watched that specific clip in Halliday’s archives
Sadly, this theory doesn’t work because there’s no proof that Parzival’s friends watched that clip
It would however fit with the movie’s theme that the winner has to be someone who learned not to make the mistakes Halliday made in life
First challenge: avoid Halliday’s mistake of moving forward so quickly that he lost his closest friend
Second challenge: take Kyra dancing like she wanted instead of what Halliday wanted (“The Shining”)
Third challenge: appreciate the creator as well as the game (the very first Easter egg being Robinette’s hidden programmer credit)
Final challenge: prove that you won’t make Halliday‘a biggest mistake by signing away his rights and his friendship with Og
NOTE: I thought this was a vast improvement on the book, which just presented challenges based on Cline’s own favorite pop-culture phenomena, with no rhyme or reason to their order