Warcross (2017)
Warcross is a 2017 internet games book written by Marie Lu.
Emika Chen picks up bounties for a living, tracking down players who bet illegally on Warcross, the virtual reality game that has swallowed the world's attention. Behind on rent and out of options, she hacks into the season's opening tournament and accidentally glitches herself onto the global stage. Marie Lu builds a neon Tokyo of holographic streets, celebrity gamers, and a reclusive young billionaire who created the whole system. What begins as an impossible break turns into a job offer with a hidden agenda. Fast, glossy, and built for readers who grew up inside their screens.
Quick answers
What is Warcross about?
Emika Chen picks up bounties for a living, tracking down players who bet illegally on Warcross, the virtual reality game that has swallowed the world's attention. Behind on rent and out of options, she hacks into the season's opening tournament and accidentally glitches herself onto the global stage. Marie Lu builds a neon Tokyo of holographic streets, celebrity gamers, and a reclusive young billionaire who created the whole system. What begins as an impossible break turns into a job offer with a hidden agenda. Fast, glossy, and built for readers who grew up inside their screens.
When was Warcross published?
Warcross was published in 2017.
Who made Warcross?
Warcross was written by Marie Lu.
Similar books
Explore Warcross guides
Warcross in our writing
A few thoughts on Warcross
The Matrix shares the thrill of a mind jacked into a coded reality, with stakes that bleed into the physical world. Muse's Simulation Theory matches the synthwave neon and the paranoia about who controls the game. For deeper cyberpunk about hackers and networked minds, Ghost in the Shell pushes the same ideas further.
Games so real you forget where the real world ends
Warcross traps its global audience inside augmented reality so total that bounty hunter Emika Chen can vanish into someone else's system. The Matrix, Sword Art Online, Ready Player One, Free Guy and TRON: Legacy all chase that same vertigo of a constructed world overtaking the actual one, and Simulation Theory's paranoid electronic pulse scores the same feeling in sound.
Video games where a shining system hides a darker agenda
Warcross's tournament looks like pure spectacle until Emika Chen realizes Hideo Tanaka built more into the game than anyone was told. Portal, Portal 2, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, BioShock and BioShock Infinite all put players inside gleaming, controlled worlds run by a creator who is never quite as trustworthy as the tutorial voice suggests.
Secretive geniuses whose empires hide a second agenda
Hideo Tanaka built Warcross into a worldwide obsession while guarding a private reason for doing it, the same pattern behind Lex Luthor's empire in Smallville, Vought's control of its heroes in The Boys, Bruce Wayne's double life in Batman: Arkham Asylum and The Dark Knight Returns, and Tony Stark's tech empire across The Avengers and Avengers: Infinity War.
Pulled into someone else's rigged competition
Emika Chen hacks her way into Warcross's opening tournament and finds herself reshaped by a game she never agreed to play, the same trap that closes around Katniss in The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, Tris in Divergent, Thomas in The Maze Runner, the apprentices of Scythe, and the conscripted pilot at the center of Iron Widow.