Wade Owen Watts is the main character of the book. Wade is a poor, orphan boy, who lives in the stacks in the outskirts of Oklahoma city with his aunt, Alice.

Wade attends school in the OASIS and goes by the name Wade3, and outside school goes by the name parzival, named after the knight Percival from Arthurian folklore.

Wade is an obsessive geek who's only goal in life is to find Halliday's Easter Egg. He spends all his time outside of school studying Halliday's life and American 80s pop-culture to gain as much knowledge as he can to solve the mystery of the Easter Egg and inherit Halliday's fortunes and gain total control over the OASIS. Wade becomes the first one to obtain the copper key, thus restarting everyones interest in the hunt.

Throughout the novel, Wade loses sight of his real goal as he gets distracted by his crush on Art3mis, and with him getting full of himself over being a famous gunter, which makes him start to get more laid back, thinking that he will somehow get lucky again and find the other keys and gates.

by the end of the novel, Wade matures and understands that he cannot be over-obessessive and neglect everything else around him, and he understands that he cannot spend all his time in the OASIS and that you must embrace reality, not run away from it.

Art3mis is a famous female gunter who runs a blog in which she talks about her advancements in her research about Halliday and the Easter Egg. Wade initially has a massive cyber crush on her, but dissmisses it as he thinks he will never get a chance to meet her. He ends up meeting her as she becomes the second person to find the key after him, where he developes feelings for her and they start going out together, although Art3mis's focus on the Easter Egg ends up turning him down and shutting him away from her life.

Art3mis is very self conscious of her real life body and her looks, which affects her self-esteem and which is also why she can never take the OASIS as seriously as other people, because she knows that you can easily hide stuff in the OASIS and adopt a fake persona, because she does the same, where she says "I'm only showing you one side of me" to wade and how she says that she's ugly in real life because she was born with a large birth mark covering half of her face, which she is always trying to hide, and which she didn't add to her avatar.

By the end of the book, she ends up meeting Wade, where she regains her trust for him, and where Wade confesses her love to her again.

Aech is white caucasian male in the OASIS who is Wade's best friend, due to their shared interests in practically everything, from TV shows and movies, to comic books and videogames, and is a renowned gunter and ruthless arena combatant in the OASIS where she earns most of her income. In the beginning of the book, Wade hangs out with Aech all the time after school in her private chat room, where they do whatever interests them but later in the book, the two's friendship dwindle when Wade becomes the first to find the copper key, as well as because of his obsession with Art3mis Aech's warnings not to trust her. they end up having fights and not talking to each other for a while. We see Aech's generosity, and supportivness as a friend in the book where she "repays her debt" to Wade, despite not having talked for a while, by giving him the location of the jade key. In the end of the novel, Aech is revealed to be an African American lesbian woman, despite her Avatar's look, because there is still lots of sexism and racism in the future, but that doesn't change her relationship with Wade at all with him saying "I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a dear friend. None of that has changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation."

Daito is a Japanese Gunter and hikikomori, a Japanese term for people who have completely withdrawn from society, who were sometimes called the "missing millions." Daito is Shoto's partner and "brother," having only met in the OASIS, but forming an unbreakable bond together. Daito is an extremely cautious person in the book, where he refuses to work with others or trust anyone, where he gets angry at Aech early in the book, when they talk about working together. Daito also gets very emotional and angry when at the sixers for "having no honor," and when he feels that his privacy has been threatened, like when Shoto asks to meet in real life, where Daito gets very angry and doesn't talk to Shotot for a while after that. Despite what he's been labeled as in Japan, he becomes a national hero once he becomes one of the first to find the copper key. Daito unfortunately gets assassinated during his quest to get the Jade key, where the IOI are able to locate him, bust into his house, and throw him off the balcony, framing it as an "otaku suicide."

Shotot is Daito's younger "brother" despite having never met him in real life. he is much younger than Daito but was also branded as a Hikikomori. In the book, you can see that Shoto is much more generous than Daito with him wanting to give the Beta Capsule to Wade, where Daito gets angry and says that they should auction it off. After Daito's death, Shoto's main objective becomes to avenge his brother Daito, by defeating the sixers, and killing Sorrento, but Sorrento ends up winning the fight against Shoto, and killing his avatar.

The IOI is a large Telecommunications and company and Internet Service Provider. The IOI is the big enemy to all gunters in the book because they are trying to take control over the OASIS to monetize it and regulate it, which is the biggest fear of all gunters, where Wade states that "The moment IOI took it over, the OASIS would cease to be the open-source virtual utopia I'd grown up in. It would become a corporate-run dystopia, an overpriced theme park for wealthy elitists." The IOI try many different tactics and schemes throughout the book, from bribery, to murder, but they all fail in front of Wade and his friends in the end.

Sorrento was a high-profile videogame designer before he started working at IOI where he became the head of the Oology division there, which means he's the controls everything that happens related to the IOI's search for the Egg. Sorrento only cares about money and power which makes him unhesitant to go as far as killing people just to win the Hunt. At the beginning of the book, Sorrent tries to manipulate all the gunters in the top 5 to get information about the copper key, but only Wade responds, when Sorrento threatens Wade with killing him and blows up his home, killing dozens of innocent civilians. later on in the book, he is able to successfully kill Daito, and was forging a plan to kill both Shoto and Art3mis bfore being stopped by Wade when he leaks Top Secret IOI files that proves he is the one that killed Daito, leading to his arrest.

James Halliday, otherwise known by his avatar's name, Anorak, was a Game Developer that created some of what was considered the best games of the time, before taking a long hiatus to develop the OASIS, which took the world by storm. Halliday gre up in Middletown, Ohio, his mother had bipolar disorder, and his father was an alcoholic. Halliday was an extremely awkward child and even as an adult, where he was diagnosed with Aspergers. in High school, he designed his first videogame, where he got lots of praise from his friends, who encouraged him to continue making videogames, and eventually make a company with his bestfriend, Ogden Morrow. Years later, Halliday and Morrow have a falling out, and he stopped talking to anyone for the last 15 years of his life, where he went into isolation to create the Competition.

Morrow was James' high school friend where they met when Halliday was invited to a D&D game where they quickly became friends and fell for the same girl, which Morrow later marries. Morrow convinces Halliday to create games and sell them, which led to the creation of their company. Later on Morrow and Halliday create the OASIS, where they have a falling out, and Morrow sees it taking over his friend and destroying his life, calling it "a self-imposed prison for humanity" which causes him to leave the company, and create his own company that makes educational games for kids. Years later, before the death of Halliday, he was asked by Halliday to talk, where he revealed that the reason he stopped talking to Morrow was because he was extremely jealous that he maries Kira, the girl they both loves, and Morrow was asked by Halliday to watch over the competition after Halliday dies, which Morrow doesnt want to do, but he decided that he should do a favor for his oldest friend, so he accepted.