The Supernatural panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2018 in Hall H let out around 11:30am on Sunday, July 22. This was our final panel at SDCC 2018. Hall H still had programming left, including panels for Riverdale, Mayans M.C., and Legion. However, we had 12:10pm reservations for the Ready Player One offsite.
The Ready Player One offsite was located across the street from the Omni, on the North side, where the Game of Thrones offsite used to be. So it wasn’t that far away. In past years, it’s been a hassle getting out of Hall H and trying to go toward the Gaslamp area, because everyone was funneled onto the tiny strip of sidewalk in front of the convention center. However, this year, the shuttles were moved down to Harbor, and the street area in front of the convention center was opened up for attendees to walk on! This made navigating out of Hall H much easier, as it was less congested.
We decided to take a peek inside Future Tech Live at the Omni, since it was right there. Josh wanted a re-do on his Overwatch Payload Tour photo op from the day before. However, there was a bit of a line, so we decided not to worry about it. On the way out, we were each handed a bag of Deadpool 2 gummy hands!
Outside of the Ready Player One offsite, there was a standby line that had formed. However, as I mentioned, we had reservations, as we had been lucky enough to snag a reservation time when they became available online a week or so prior. I showed my reservation to the doorman, and he had us wait off to the side for a couple of minutes, since we were about 15 minutes early. But then another guy came out and checked our reservation, and went ahead and took us at 12:00pm, saying that it didn’t really matter what time our reservation was for, just as long as we had a reservation.
Once inside, we were each given a red wristband and a Room 237 souvenir key chain, and let in with a small group of others. Then each group took turns taking their photo inside of this cool looking tunnel.
After that, we were directed to roped off lines. Others were directed to a different line than us, and slowly directed through a doorway. But we were still kept in the separate line. Later we realized that the red wristband must indicate that we had a reservation, and everyone else was from the standby line. We were soon taken into a small escape room of sorts, decorated to appear like Wade/Parzival’s home.
We were told we could take photos and video for a few moments, but then once the escape room portion started, we could no longer do so. The first part was that there were cassette tapes scattered all around the room. The escape room attendant would play a short clip of an 80s song, and then we were supposed to go and find the corresponding cassette tape. He did this for four songs. After that, we had to go and find where Parzival’s haptic gloves were hidden. They turned out to be under his pillow, and the key to escape the room was hidden inside the gloves. We used the key to unlock the door, and were sent on our way to the next portion of the tour.
We entered a long hallway that appeared to have many doors. At the end of the hall was Room 237. Inside, it looked like the bathroom scene from The Shining.
Then there was an arcade room full of old school arcade games, air hockey, and foosball. All of the games were set to free play!
#ReadyPlayerOne Experience #SDCC https://t.co/u5cDjM2TCW
— GB Reviews (@gb_reviews) July 22, 2018
The next room we entered had Rubik’s cubes and mirrors everywhere, giving it a cool optical illusion effect.
Next was a display of the inside of Parzival’s secret lair.
Then we reached the end of the offsite, which had props from the movie on display, including a statue of the Iron Giant!
The evening before, our friend Alex (aka @DeLoreanWolfgng) had tipped us off that if you ask for a VHS of the movie, they will give it to you. So I asked one of the workers about it, and she asked how many were in my group, which was 2, me and Josh. Then she gave each of us a VHS tape of Ready Player One! What we didn’t realize until we got the tapes was that they were actually autographed by Ernest Cline, the author of Ready Player One! How cool is that? We also later heard that they were randomly giving out vinyl records of the Ready Player One soundtrack to people with the VHS tape. Too bad we didn’t get that too. Oh well.
Overall, it was a fun little walk through for fans of the movie. But I’m not sure I would have wanted to wait in line for a long time if we didn’t have a reservation, especially if you didn’t get to do the escape room portion too, and also if you didn’t know about the VHS tape.
We had a few more things to take care of before SDCC 2018 came to a final close for us, including checking out the Manifest offsite, picking up our swag at the Program Premiums room, and picking up our exclusive Comic-Con merch. Stay tuned for more on that!
