First look at nostalgic sci-fi Ready Player One

We might have hit peak 80s pop culture with both Stranger Things season two and Ready Player One trailers being released on the same weekend.

The latter is the latest film from Steven Spielberg, which is based on Ernest Cline's 2011 novel set in 2044 in a dystopia where most people have turned to a virtual reality computer game called Oasis for solace from the grim world in which they live.

The film centres on a teenage gamer (played by X-Men: Apocalypse and Tree of Life actor Tye Sheridan) who’s living in the past. "I was born in 2025," he says in voiceover in the trailer, "but I wish I'd grown up in the 1980s, like all my heroes." The premise is that the young gamer is on the hunt for some Easter eggs left in the Oasis game by its inventor, with the promise that whoever collects them will inherit the inventor’s huge fortune.

Ready Player One doesn’t look a whole lot like a Spielberg film, given its reliance on CGI imagery – Michael Bay’s Transformers series or the Wachowskis' Speed Racer are closer fits. Fans of 80s and 90s cinema, however, are sure to enjoy identifying the many references that appear in the film. In this two-and-a-half-minute teaser we spotted The Iron Giant, A Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Kruger, the bikes from Akira and Back to the Future’s DeLorean. Take a look at the trailer above and let us know the references you spot.

Ready Player One is due for release on 30 Mar 2018.