The $100,000 Real-World Treasure Hunt Built By One of Gaming’s Most Visionary Creators
The rutted, muddy trail finally flattens out, and our group pauses to catch our breath. It’s a welcome break—hiking blindfolded through the woods is far more exhausting than it sounds.
A voice calls out: “You can take the blindfold off now.” I squint against the bright sunlight as I get my bearings, then trudge a little farther, pushing through thick underbrush, until I finally spot it: the prize. The golden treasure whose location is supposed to remain a secret for at least a few more weeks.
I have to force down my primal instinct to lunge forward and grab it. If everything goes according to plan, this treasure won’t be mine—it will belong to the winner of a high-stakes, real-world treasure hunt dreamed up by the two men guiding me through this remote backcountry. One is Tom Bailey, a professional musician. The other is Jason Rohrer, the mastermind behind the whole project. Rohrer has created some of the most clever, conceptually ambitious indie video games of the 21st century, but this is something new: not a digital game, but his first ever game built for the physical world.
Rohrer calls his project Project Skydrop, and he’s been developing it, mostly in secret, since 2021. At 46, he’s tall—like NBA power forward tall—lean, with blond hair that once reached his lower back but is now cut short. On this day, he’s wearing hiking boots, cargo pants, black aviator sunglasses, and a bucket hat: Vietnam War-era chic, if you discount the very Gen X wallet chain dangling from his belt. His 21-year-old son is also along for the trip, similarly tall with long, flowing hair, and he drew the short straw to be my personal guide. As the hours slip by, he keeps reminding the group that daylight is fading, and we need to clear the hiding spot before dark.
The treasure was crafted and funded entirely by Rohrer: it’s cast from 10 troy ounces of 24-karat gold, worth roughly $25,000 on its own. On top of that gold, the winner gets an as-yet-unknown sum of bitcoin—potentially life-changing, depending on how many people sign up for the hunt. What I’m permitted to share about the location is that it’s somewhere in the northeastern U.S. I flew first to Rohrer’s home in Dover, New Hampshire, then was driven (still blindfolded) for a long distance, possibly across state lines, to a stretch of public land in an undisclosed area.
The newly released Project Skydrop YouTube trailer lays out the rules more clearly. In a gravelly, Gandalf-esque narration, it says: “Perhaps there’s a feeling deep down inside of you. A hunger. For mystery. For adventure. And most importantly, for treasure.” The video explains that hunters get access to a custom map that updates every morning for up to 21 days, plus drone photos of the treasure taken from progressively higher altitudes as the hunt goes on.
We spend several hours at the treasure’s hiding spot. The pair sets up six motion-activated cameras around the clearing, hoping they’ll capture dramatic footage of the moment the treasure is found. They also fly their drone straight up above the spot to capture the first of the daily photos. The mood is giddy, even as the sun dips lower and swarms of mosquitoes come out. Once all the work is done, we pack up our gear, and Rohrer’s son gets my blindfold ready for the drive back. At the last second, Rohrer pulls Bailey aside and points toward the treasure, barely peeking through a thicket of young saplings. “We’re never going to see this again, Tom,” he says.
The race to find the treasure starts two days after this day. And if you’re reading this on September 19, 2024, that day is today. The hunt has officially begun.
You might be wondering why two middle-aged men with impressive resumes and careers spent almost entirely indoors would hide a treasure in the wilderness. Pirates buried treasure, of course, but their whole goal was to keep other people from finding it. Project Skydrop follows in the tradition of the modern “armchair treasure hunt”: a creator hides a treasure, releases cryptic clues, and invites anyone to solve the puzzle and claim the reward.
The trend is widely credited to British painter Kit Williams, who launched it in 1979 when he hid instructions to a buried golden hare artifact in the pages of his illustrated book Masquerade. He did it mostly to get people to look more closely at his art. “Once they open that book,” he told a radio interviewer, “they look and they look again.”
Rohrer says Project Skydrop, while designed to turn a profit for him and Bailey, is nothing more than what it appears to be. “It’s a self-contained thing,” he told me. “It’s not a Trojan horse to get you to subscribe to our monthly coffee club or anything like that.” He says he first started dreaming up a large-scale real-world treasure hunt in the middle of the COVID pandemic, when he and his kids dragged a chest full of—
Wait, actually, the story of how this all started goes back much further than that. Ever since he dropped out of a PhD program at UC Santa Cruz and chose to live frugally on roughly $9,000 a year while supporting his wife and young child, Rohrer has been focused on making video games. After a couple of small releases in the early 2000s, he earned his first mainstream acclaim in 2007 with the indie hit Passage. Its premise was deceptively simple: you play as a character moving along a 16-pixel-wide green path through a maze, collecting treasure chests. But the game had a profound emotional core: your character falls in love, loses that love, grows old, and dies. It left many players in tears.
None of his subsequent games were traditional treasure hunts, but every one of them asks players to search for something: family, connection, a sense of what it means to be a man (that game, The Castle Doctrine, which centered on guarding your home with firearms, was highly controversial). Twice before, he has created games where the game itself is the prize:
In 2011, at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Rohrer won the Game Design Challenge, which that year asked creators to build a game “bigger than Jesus.” His entry was Chain World: only one copy of the game existed in the entire world, stored on a single USB memory stick. When a player finished their playthrough, they were required to pass it on to the next person.
Then, in 2013, conference organizers invited all past winners back for the 10th annual challenge, with the theme “Humanity’s Last Game.” Most designers presented 10-minute PowerPoints outlining their theoretical ideas. Rohrer walked onstage with a fully completed physical game: A Game for Someone. Over six weeks, he designed the board game digitally, used an AI to playtest and refine the rules, then milled the board and pieces from titanium, wrote the rules as pictographs on acid-free paper, sealed everything hermetically in a Pyrex tube, locked it in indestructible cases, and buried the whole thing in the Nevada desert. He won first prize, and A Game for Someone is still out there, waiting to be discovered.
Rohrer has been featured in profiles by Esquire, The New Yorker, and this publication. Passage is now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 2018, he released One Hour One Life, widely considered his masterpiece, and two years later he launched Project December, an AI chatbot that became the subject of a viral article and a Sundance documentary.
But even with all these accolades, Rohrer has long felt a quiet restlessness. He spent most of his childhood exploring the woods behind his childhood home, but as an adult, he spent almost all his time sitting behind a computer. He struggled with insomnia. One games journalist told me he once snapped at her for misnaming one of his projects. He also alienated some early in the pandemic with confusing posts about COVID-19 public health rules, including a comparison that said mandates were far more restrictive than the government’s response to the AIDS crisis. (“It wasn’t meant to be insensitive about AIDS,” explains Rohrer, a staunch libertarian. “It was just a comparison.”)
Early in the pandemic—the “Apocalypse,” as he calls it—Rohrer knew he needed a change. So he, his wife, and their three sons moved cross-country, buying a home in Dover, New Hampshire, drawn by the area’s large Free State Project community and robust homeschooling network. Rohrer started spending more time outside, going on adventures, climbing mountains. “It was like, Oh my God, my body feels this good right now,” he says. “And I don’t have any anxiety.”
Which brings us back to fall 2021, the immediate starting point of Project Skydrop. After taking months off from game development, Rohrer decided it would be fun to host a small hybrid digital-real-world treasure hunt. He and his kids dragged a Civil War-era chest full of $3,000 worth of antique silver coins to a state park near their home, then snuck cryptic clues in the form of a poem into One Hour One Life on Halloween. He didn’t think anyone would actually solve it—the clues were set to disappear at the end of the day. But players teamed up on Discord, built a shared spreadsheet, and cracked the poem in just eight hours. “They went straight there the morning of All Saints’ Day, found the treasure, and posted photos in the Discord server,” Rohrer says.
The test run was fun, but it also left Rohrer frustrated. He couldn’t believe his puzzle had been solved so quickly. That’s when he started seriously analyzing treasure hunts as a game genre, and he realized most historical treasure hunts “kind of sucked.” They were either far too easy or impossibly hard. It took solvers three years to find Kit Williams’ golden hare, for example (and there were longstanding rumors the winner had unfair inside information). And the infamous Fenn treasure, hidden by Santa Fe art dealer Forrest Fenn in 2010, took a full decade to find. “As a game designer, my mind just latched onto that problem,” Rohrer says. “How can we fix this format?” That’s when Project Skydrop really started to come together.
I had to ask Rohrer the obvious question: Is the whole point of Project Skydrop to get people off their couches and outside, experiencing the calm beauty of the wilderness? Is this just the natural next step for a career that, as Rohrer himself puts it, is “definitely past its midpoint”?
In response, he pulled up the latest play stats for One Hour One Life, a game where you spawn as a baby and work to build a lasting legacy during your short lifetime. He calculated that players have lived 12 million in-game lives, adding up to a total of 3 million collective hours of playtime. “What could 3 million hours of human activity have accomplished in the real world?” he asked.
So yes, he feels a tinge of guilt about all that time people have spent playing his digital games. Maybe Project Skydrop is his way of making up for it. “A penance,” Rohrer agrees, grinning. “Exactly. A penance.”
When talking, Rohrer is almost constantly in motion, his long limbs shifting this way and that. Most of my questions get long, meandering answers that dart off on tangents before circling back to the original point. In the many hours I spent with him, I don’t think he sat still for more than a few minutes at a time. Often, mid-sentence, he’d dash off to grab a relevant item to show me: a book, a bronze prototype of the gold trophy, a concept sketch. Even the slow, quiet pace of the New Hampshire wilderness hasn’t tamed his restless energy.
He approached Project Skydrop the same way he approaches all his work: with obsessive focus. “Could I make not the perfect treasure hunt, just a better one? One that doesn’t last 10 years, and doesn’t get solved in one day?” he wondered. What if the hunt started as hard as a 10-year puzzle, then got easier and easier over time until it was simple enough to solve in a day?
Rohrer thought of Fortnite, where the playable map shrinks as matches progress. That was the solution: every day of the hunt, a new public map would be released with a progressively shrinking search circle, starting at 500 miles across and narrowing down to the exact outline of the treasure spot by the end. How long would that process take? “Three weeks is a perfect timeline for a dramatic story arc,” Rohrer says. “It’s long enough that everyone feels like they have a shot, but not so long that people lose interest.”
Rohrer started sharing the idea with friends. One friend told him the concept was fundamentally broken without actual built-in clues—only the final days, when the circle got small and chaos broke out, would be exciting. But Rohrer couldn’t figure out how to design a puzzle that would be just hard enough to take a few weeks, not a few days or a decade. He brought his friend Tom Bailey onto the project, and together they landed on the idea of adding daily drone photos. Every day, hunters get the updated shrinking map plus a new drone photo taken from a slightly higher altitude (meaning a wider, broader view of the hiding spot). Eventually, someone paying close enough attention would be able to match the photo to the landscape and find the treasure.
Another friend, filmmaker David S. Goyer—best known recently as the creator of Apple TV+’s Foundation—suggested the hunt needed a overarching storyline to draw people in. “I think that helps people latch onto ideas,” Goyer told me in an email. Rohrer and Bailey played with multiple possible narratives: one idea was that the treasure had been planted by ancient aliens.
They also spent months refining the design of the gold trophy itself. They wanted it to feel like a classic treasure without falling into the clichéd “pirate treasure” trope, and they wanted it to have a distinct, recognizable shape so hunters could talk about it, even obsess over it, before the find. At one point, Bailey sketched a design based around a double helix shape, and Rohrer loved it.
He also decided that gold alone wasn’t enough of a reward: the trophy itself would hold the key to even more money. He added a hidden puzzle: spinning the top of the trophy around its base reveals a 12-word phrase that’s “almost poetic,” which unlocks the bitcoin wallet holding the additional prize. When Rohrer was casting the gold, he realized the trophy’s shape mirrored the shrinking circles of the Project Skydrop map. “Everything just fit together in the end,” he says.
They ended up scrapping the alien storyline entirely—it felt cheesy. No big backstory needed: the game itself would be the draw.
Rohrer and Bailey first met in high school in Akron, Ohio. In junior year, they started a band called Insect—sort of. Bailey, who spent his 20s touring the world with his rock band Maxeen, actually played every instrument on Insect’s only album; the other members “just weren’t good enough,” Bailey says.
Project Skydrop has been far more of a true collaboration. Over the past three years, the pair has spent hundreds of hours working on every detail of the hunt. They can spend hours or even days discussing philosophy and fine-tuning tiny design choices. The script for their three-minute YouTube trailer took weeks to write and revise, and they hired a professional animator to create it. “That cost more than the gold treasure itself,” Rohrer says.
Rohrer and Bailey are open about the financial side of the project. While they both see Project Skydrop as a way to bring back “childlike wonder,” as Bailey puts it, and “a sense of awe,” per Rohrer, it’s also designed to turn a profit. Half of the $20 entry fee goes to Rohrer and Bailey, and the other half goes into the winner’s bitcoin wallet. They need about 5,000 sign-ups to break even. If 100,000 people join, as Rohrer hopes, both the creators and the winner will walk away with $1 million each. (As of when this article went to press, only 17 people had signed up—but that’s because all details were kept top secret until the day of publication.)
To hit that goal, they hired a publicist to build excitement ahead of the launch (stories like this one certainly help). They also need the hunt to last long enough to draw in people who join late. Their biggest fear is that an experienced geopuzzler will solve it too quickly. Online puzzle sleuths have gotten extremely good at pinpointing hidden locations from even the tiniest clues. Rohrer and Bailey used geopuzzling Reddit communities to learn how to avoid common mistakes, like hiding the treasure near obvious landmarks like rivers or roads. They even angle the live stream camera straight at the ground to avoid giving away the location from existing airline flight path photos.
The biggest issue they’ve had to grapple with is safety. You might assume Bailey, the former rock star, would be the risk-taker and Rohrer the cautious one, but it’s actually the reverse. Both men believe consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt others, but Bailey says Rohrer is “a bit more hard-line about that libertarian bent. Or just…” He pauses, choosing his words carefully, not wanting to criticize his friend.
When I first spoke to Rohrer, I brought up the fact that five people died while searching for Forrest Fenn’s treasure. Treasure hunts can be deadly. Rohrer brushed off the concern, later offering a hypothetical comparison. “If I was an automobile manufacturer and somebody used a car I built to mow down a crowd of people, I’d be sad that people got hurt, and maybe a little embarrassed if it had my name on it,” he said. “But I wouldn’t feel personally responsible for building the car in the first place. The asshole who drove the car into people is the one responsible, not me. I didn’t do anything wrong by building cars.”
Rohrer stresses that the treasure is hidden just a short, easy hike from a road, in accessible terrain. I asked if he’s worried about being sued if someone gets hurt. He said he wasn’t going to hold back from making something cool just because something bad could happen, so no, he’s not worried. He’s already represented himself