Entertainment Weekly have bagged another exclusive this week and it comes in the first look image from Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One with Tye Sheridan taking centre stage.

Related: Ready Player One News

The image features Sheridan as Wade Watts, one of the world’s foremost aficionados on all-things-’80s, operating under the online name Parzival (a variation on the Arthurian Knight Percival.) wearing his virtual reality Oculus and haptic glove positioned in a van whilst immersed in his virtual world. The image is said to have many clues and 80’s pop-culture references, including a He-Man lunchbox and nods to Wade’s idol James Halliday the games founder of the Oasis simulated world, to keep the biggest of fans busy for some time.

Ready Player One

Set in the near future, Ready Player One follows outcast teenager Wade Watts (Sheridan), who escapes from his bleak surroundings by logging in to the OASIS, a globally networked virtual utopia where users can lead idyllic alternate lives. When eccentric billionaire who created the OASIS dies, he offers up his vast fortune as the prize in an elaborate treasure hunt. Along with gamers from around the world, Wade joins the adventure, and quickly finds himself pitted against powerful corporate foes and other ruthless competitors who will do anything, in the oasis or the real world, to reach the treasure first.

Directed by Spielberg, Ready Player One will also star Olivia Cook, Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg, and Ben Mendelsohn who revealed back in June why his character, Sorrento, a high ranking official and head of a group of bounty hunters, won’t stay faithful to the novel.

Ready Player One (2018)
Tye Sheridan as Wade Owen Watts/Parzival

Spielberg will also produce alongside alongside Donald De Line for De Line Pictures with Dan Farah and Kristie Macosko Krieger. Bruce Berman will serve as executive producer. Based on Ernest Cline’s novel, the screenplay is by Cline, Zak Penn and Eric Eason. Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future trilogy) will compose the music.