Did you ever draw your own treasure map and pretend to go searching for it as a kid? Well, in a forest somewhere in the northeast, potentially here in the D.C. area, a real life treasure hunt is going on.
It’s called Project Skydrop, a creation of video game designer Jason Rohrer, and it launched this week.
The good news is, anyone registered to search is also getting clues about where it might actually be.
“There’s a shrinking circle that’s visible on our website on the map. And on Day One of the treasure hunt, it starts out at 500 miles in diameter, and it shrinks a little bit every day,” Rohrer said.
“By the end of three weeks, it’s going to shrink down to a single foot, pinpointing the treasure.”
On Friday, when Rohrer spoke with WTOP, the 400 mile radius included most of Maryland, as well as D.C. and parts of northern Virginia.
The line cut through Fairfax and Loudoun counties on Friday. However, Rohrer noted that if the treasure was in the middle of the circle, people would just head to an area along the New York and Pennsylvania line and find it.
At this point, the buried treasure is not centered by the circle on the map.
“As the circle shrinks, the new circle is always inside the old circle,” Rohrer promised. “But it kind of moves around. If you were to map all the circles together, they almost look like a swirly kind of tornado, or water going down a drain, or something as they swirl around.”
That’s kind of how you would describe the 10-ounce golden treasure everyone is looking for. It’s made up of 24 karat gold with a value of more than $25,000. It’s a series of golden rings that sort of looks like a chalice and is about the size of an ice cream cone. He said they actually carried it in a yogurt container to wherever it’s been hidden.
“It’s actually a machine,” explained Rohrer. “So the two parts of the sculpture come apart and interface with each other to form a decoding machine to decode the information that’s necessary to get the prize bounty that’s growing.”
That’s the other part of this fun. It costs $20 to registered for the treasure hunt and the daily clues that get emailed out, but whoever finds the golden treasure will also be able to get 50% of the registration fees collected. As of Friday afternoon the bounty was more than $6,000, but it will grow as more people sign up.
Now it’s somewhat possible that some random person who is not even part of the hunt can end up finding this in whatever forest it’s in. But Rohrer called that highly unlikely.
“We didn’t see a single soul the entire time,” said Rohrer. “So it’s not a place that tons of people just wander around. I don’t think without the GPS location, that I could find the treasure myself.”
You can go online and see a livestream of the treasure, since cameras have been set up around it. It’s just sitting on the ground amidst dead leaves and brush. Deer have been caught in some of the pictures, too. It’s part of his efforts to make what he calls the greatest treasure hunt ever.
“I was kind of inspired by treasure hunts that happened in the past, but they all kind of were broken, and for lack of a better expression, kind of sucked in one way or another,” said Rohrer. “So I was thinking as a game designer, could I make a make a better treasure hunt?”
“The puzzle gets easier and easier over time,” he added. “Starts impossible on Day One, becomes 100% solvable by the very end of three weeks, because a lot of the other treasure hunts either go on forever, never get solved, or somebody finds a solution very quickly and the whole thing spoiled.”
In addition to the map that gets updated every day, he said those who register for the hunt will be emailed overhead shots of the treasure. A drone took a shot of it from 4 feet above on Friday. Saturday’s aerial view should be from about 12 feet off the ground. You’ll see more and more of the surrounding landscape each day.
“Nothing like this has ever happened in human history,” Rohrer said. “And we’re just trying to make an amazing experience that’s almost like living in a movie, but a movie that you can live in real life.”
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