Ready Player One is a movie that revels in all of its easter eggs and pop culture references. However, it turns out there's at least one reference that very likely nobody noticed. That's because the easter egg wasn't a reference to some popular, or even obscure, piece of 1980s pop culture. It was actually a reference to the movie itself. Composer Alan Silvestri reveals in one of the special features attached to the Ready Player One Blu-ray that the opening piece of music he composed to introduce the virtual world, titled "The Oasis," actually contains the second clue of the film's contest in its entirety, only you don't notice because the words are spoken in Latin. According to Silvestri...
This idea begins to develop that there is a place in the film where Samantha and Wade read the second clue. So, we're talking at lunch and it's like 'what is easter egg in Latin?' And it's ovum patrice tui. That's kinda cool. So that was it. That whole opening piece is the second clue of the film in Latin and the chorus is 'father's egg, easter egg, find me, come find me.'
In point of fact, ovum patrice tui is actually the Latin for "father's egg" the phrase that starts the chorus, not easter egg. The Latin words for easter egg are actually pashca ovum. Alan Silvestri got his Latin a bit confused, but don't we all now and then? Either way, it's still a great easter egg of its own, that actually includes the words easter egg.
It seems that Steven Spielberg had requested music that sounded religious in nature, including the use of a choir, to be used when the audience first sees the OASIS. This led Alan Silvestri to begin to consider how he might create such music. He took his inspiration from the film itself and actually translated one of the clues in Ready Player One into Latin, adding some additional lyrics to make up the chorus of the piece. One assumes the "father" here is James Halliday, the creator of the contest and the "father" of the OASIS as the man who created it. You can listen to the piece of music below. The chorus starts at about the 51-second mark with the line Silvestri mentions above. It also confirms the correct Latin words for "easter egg."
It's not clear from what is said in the Blu-ray special feature why Steven Spielberg was looking for the first piece of music inside the OASIS to sound this way, though it's certainly fitting. It's specifically mentioned in the Ready Player One novel that James Halliday spoke Latin, and that Wade Watts studied it in school as well for that reason. It doesn't really come up in the film version, but Spielberg did read the novel, so perhaps that inspired him.
Since not a lot of people speak Latin, it seems unlikely many people paid much attention to the words sung by the choir, but if you had, you would have received one piece of the movie's puzzle a lot earlier than the rest of the characters. Ready Player One is now available on Digital and Blu-ray.
