Recently, a nationwide competition defined golden treasure worth more than $26,000 came to an end in western Massachusetts's Franklin County, when Dan Leonard used his meteorology skills to locate the treasure. But now, Project Skydrop says a new treasure hunt is unfolding somewhere in the woods is more than $87,000 in pure gold waiting to be discovered. In the first hunt, registered participants received clues throughout the search as a search diameter on the Project Kkydrop website grew smaller each day until the hunt was over. This time, there's a puzzle. I spoke with the New Hampshire based game designers Jason Rohrer and Tom Bailey who are behind the hunt.
Jason Rohrer: We had been sort of studying the history of treasure hunts. In my lifetime there have been about three or four big ones going back into the 1970s and thinking about what made them work, how they went kind of like people went kind of crazy over them, but most of them, kind of broke in unfortunate ways. And so, we were trying to design a treasure hunt that just had a very controllable dramatic arc where we could kind of basically guarantee it didn't go on forever. Because there's one treasure hunt that started in the 80s that still hasn't been solved to this day, and that seems like it's just too hard. So, we wanted it to spread over three weeks. But we wanted something that people were really motivated to go after. So that's why we had this golden object that we created and put in the woods initially. Yeah, I don't know Tom. You want to talk a little bit about that object.
Tom Bailey: Co-creator of the game and everything here. So, the treasure that's already been found was kind of a like the idea of some of the initial ideas or designs were like the expansion of the universe coming from a single point and expanding outward. And it ended up looking like a chalice and almost looking like rings, like as the shrink shrinking circle kind of idea, which was, uh, really interesting.
Rohrer: But, yeah, I think a lot of people just saw this thing because we had these photographs of it sitting in the woods, and then we also had live trail cams looking at it, 24/7 sitting in the woods.
Bailey: Right.
Rohrer: And so, I think a lot of people like, ‘Oh my gosh, that thing. What is that thing?’ It was kind of mysterious looking. It was kind of strange. Kind of strange looking. Does look like treasure, but it doesn't look exactly like any, you know, it doesn't look like a skull or some kind of animal or something. It's very abstract. But it's still people obviously recognized it as treasure and something that they wanted.
Bailey: Right.
Rohrer: And so, lots of people really wanted this thing, and that was what sort of was the impetus to kick the whole thing off, right? That there's this crazy, valuable, interesting, unique thing in the woods.
You had people all over the nation looking for this initially. What was it like watching that unfold and kind of watching people drive themselves crazy, even though they knew that that circle was going to get smaller and it was either going to be really close to them or really not?
Bailey: Well, of course, it was extremely exciting to see everybody engaging, and the excitement on the discord really heating up. Local News was fantastic, and it seemed like everyone wanted to know more about this treasure hunt and get involved in some way, shape or form. And so, it was really exciting to see everyone really diving in.
Rohrer: We also just kept running into people, just in real life, who were like, ‘Oh my gosh, wait, that treasure hunt I heard about. Wait, you're the guys who are doing that.’ Like, there's some guys who are working on fixing my chimney at my house. And they were like, ‘We heard about this on the radio.’
Bailey: Even though we've we told people the clues are kind of limited to this one area, people were still like, ‘I don't believe them,’ and just kind of going off on any rabbit hole.
Rohrer: Like the slogan for the treasure hunt that the narrator says at the end of the video is ‘May your keen eyes serve you well,’ right? And everyone and thought that must mean it's near Keen, New Hampshire.
How did word spread about this?
Bailey: Well, really it was, I think press, local press was, was one of the biggest things.
Rohrer: We kick started it by having we set up ahead of time, two articles with two different reporters that were interested in covering it. We got in touch with some reporters and like, yes, we want to cover this. And that was WIRED Magazine and Outside Magazine. And so, in fact, the WIRED reporter actually came with us to hide the treasure on the condition that he had to be blindfolded, right? So, he rode all the way from Dover, New Hampshire to the location is known now. It was in Wendell state forest in Massachusetts. So, he wrote, it's like a two-and-a-half-hour trip he did entirely blindfolded in our truck, and he ate his lunch on the side of the road blindfolded, not knowing where he was even eating lunch. And then he did the hike in, which is like at least a mile up a pretty steep trail, blindfolded.
Bailey: Surprisingly enough.
Rohrer: And we took off the blindfold at the end of the trail when we were about to go into the bushwhacking part of the trip. He was totally shocked at his surroundings. He thought from the humidity level or the smell in the air, he thought he was on the seaside, somewhere, like on, like near the ocean. And we took off the blindfold and saw that he was in the middle of the woods. He was just kind of flabbergasted.
Bailey: He was completely disoriented. He didn't really have a good sense of time either. We kind of checked, like, ‘how long do you think it's been?’ And he's like, 45 minutes and it already been over two hours.
Rohrer: Yeah, he thought, he thought he'd been driving for 45 minutes when he'd been driving for over two hours.
On the website, it's written, we're pretty sure that the only winner who has the treasure can solve this bounty puzzle and find the bounty treasure. What makes you sure that?
Bailey: Well, the reason why we said that is because the little sidebar we were thrown was that the treasure Dan [Leonard] was kind of flashing the treasure around, which revealed some of its secrets. And so, we've been doing our best to create a puzzle that we feel like won't be snaked underneath Dan, and he still has a pretty fair chance of retrieving the bounty.
Rohrer: Yeah, we thought it was clear in the beginning that the treasure itself is, you know, has secrets on it that only the winner is supposed to see. And the narrator in the original video even says, ‘Hey, you see that part that's blurred out? That's the recovery phrase for a Bitcoin wallet,’ right? It's blurred out in the video because we're hoping it's very clear that this is a secret, right? So, when the winner picked up the treasure, I don't know if he didn't really understand, or he was too excited, or whatever, but he didn't really get the idea that the secret writing that's all over the treasure hasn't been shown in any of the photographs for a reason, and for whatever reason, he ended up flipping the treasure over and showing all the secret writing in very clear photographs that got published in the press. We had to scramble. So, we spent like, three- or four-days late nights trying to figure out, like, what can we do now? You know, now that this thing has been compromised, like, what other information does only Dan have that he could use to retrieve this bounty, and lot of late nights, a lot of like, this is impossible. And then we finally had this aha moment where we realized how we could create a puzzle that we think only he could solve, but he seems to be having some trouble solving it so far so, but you know, we feel like it's okay because, you know, he threw us these curveballs. I mean, the other thing he was supposed to do, he's supposed to shoot a video of himself picking up the treasure. That was one of the core rules that was emphasized heavily in all everything that was on the website. And everybody knew, everyone was emailing us asking about what exactly had to be in the video they were going to shoot when they picked up the treasure. So, people were very focused on this video. And when it was clear to everybody else in the community that he picked up the treasure without shooting a video, because you could see he didn't have a video camera out, or any kind of phone out, when he picked up the treasure on the trail cams, everyone went ballistic. Saying, ‘wait a minute, he didn't follow the rules. What? Now doesn't the second-place person get it?’ But all kinds of people are trying to claim that they deserve the bounty because he didn't shoot his video.
But you guys could tell on the trail cam that he was the one who picked it up despite not having that video. So, there's the next hunt going on right now. The prize is worth more than $87,000 there's the little gold jar on the live camera feed. I'm looking at it right now. It's sitting there. So, what's next? I mean, obviously people are out there looking for this.
Rohrer: Yeah, there is no circle this time, there is a puzzle. And the puzzle is, it's a doozy. It's a pretty, pretty hairy puzzle, but people who are looking at it and looking at it closely are sort of figuring out what it's all about. And I think Dan has figured out most of the puzzle so far. He's just got a couple of last pieces that he's working through. And yeah, so the hope is that this, we're trying to make the process as transparent as possible, is also right. So, everyone's like, ‘What's going to go on? Are you guys keeping the money? Is this a scam?’ You know, all that kind of stuff happened after he didn't shoot the video. And so, you know, we so the fact that the thing is sitting there in public with a camera looking at it, that's motion sensitive, and when it's finally taken, everyone will see who takes it right. It’ll help to kind of bring, bring an end to the story that everyone can kind of be part of and witness, as opposed to, like, some backroom deal, you know, where, ‘Whoa, yeah, we gave the winner the money,’ you know, but they never really see what happened, right? And so, it'll be crystal clear when it happens. Everyone will know the exact moment when it happens, and the story will come to an end in a very transparent, public way.
Project Skydrop’s Jason Rohrer and Tom Bailey.