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To promote his bestselling 2011 sci-fi novel Ready Player One, author Ernest Cline traveled from book tour event to book tour event in style: at the wheel of a 1982 DeLorean DMC-12, tricked out with a KITT-style grille light and Back to the Future flux capacitor.
Now, to promote the paperback release of the book, he’s going one better: readers who find the easter egg buried in the book and solve a series of online puzzles will get a DeLorean of their very own.
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It’s a fairly genius marketing tie-in for a book which, although it’s set in the dystopian future, is steeped in ’80s nostalgia. As Douglas Wolk wrote in TIME upon its release:
Ready Player One is immersed in the wave of video games that began with Zork and Pac-Man in 1980–even though its narrator, Wade Watts, is a teenager in the grim, gray mid-America of 2045. He lives in a trailer park where mobile homes are stacked dozens of levels high, and his dream is to inherit the late zillionaire James Halliday’s fortune by becoming the first person to conquer the ultimate video game: a puzzle whose solution demands deep knowledge of the nerd culture of Halliday’s ’80s childhood, the golden afternoon of Real Genius and the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Max Headroom.