The muddy trail levels out and we stop to catch our breath. Which is good, because hiking with my eyes covered has been a pain in the ass. A voice says: “You can take your blindfold off now.” I squint as I get my bearings. Then, after a bit more hiking and some bushwhacking, I finally see it. The prize. The thing no one is supposed to know the location of, at least for another few weeks. A golden treasure.
I have to fight a lizard-brain instinct to reach for it. No. If all goes to plan, the treasure will soon belong to someone else—to the winner of a wild treasure hunt dreamed up by two of the guys leading me through this remote wilderness. One is a musician named Tom Bailey. The other is Jason Rohrer, the mastermind. Rohrer has designed some of the brainiest, highest-concept video games of the 21st century. Now there’s this: not a video game, but Rohrer’s first game set in the real world.
Rohrer calls it Project Skydrop, and he’s been working on it, mostly in secret, since 2021. He is 46 years old and tall. Like NBA-power-forward tall. And skinny. His blond hair, which once hung down his back, is now cut short. Today, he’s in boots, cargo pants, black aviator glasses, and a bucket hat. (Think: Vietnam War chic, save for an extremely Gen X wallet chain.) His 21-year-old son is also here, similarly tall, hair youthfully flowing. He’d drawn the short straw and had to be my personal guide. As the hours drag on, he reminds the group that we’re losing sun and should really leave the hiding spot before dark.
The treasure was paid for and made by Rohrer himself, cast from 10 troy ounces of 24k gold. It’s worth about $25,000, but added to that bounty is a yet-to-be-determined, potentially life-changing amount of bitcoin, depending on how many people participate in the hunt. What I’m allowed to tell you about the treasure’s location is that it’s somewhere in the northeastern United States and that I got here by first flying to Rohrer’s home in Dover, New Hampshire. Maybe I should add, at the risk of saying too much, that I was then driven (again, blindfolded) quite a ways away, possibly across state lines, to public land who knows where. A just-released YouTube trailer for Project Skydrop offers more specifics. “Perhaps there’s a feeling deep down inside of you,” goes the Gandalfian narration. “A hunger. For mystery. For adventure. And most importantly, for treasure.” Then the video explains that to find the treasure, there’s a special map, updated each morning for (at most) 21 days, and photos taken via drone, shot from progressively higher and higher points above the treasure.
We spend several hours at the drop site. The guys mount six motion-sensor cameras around the clearing, which they hope will provide epic footage of the find. They also fly their drone straight up and start snapping pics. The mood is giddy, even as the sun begins to set and mosquitoes descend. Tasks done, we finally pack up, and Rohrer’s kid readies my blindfold for the trip back. At the last moment, Rohrer calls Bailey over and points at their treasure, barely visible through a mess of baby trees. “We’re never gonna see it again, Tom,” Rohrer says.
Two days from this moment, the race to find it starts. And if you are reading this on September 19, 2024, that day is today. The hunt has just begun.
Why, you may ask, are these two middle-aged guys, with impressive CVs and extremely indoor vocations, hiding treasure in the great outdoors? Pirates did this sort of thing, sure, but the point back then was for strangers not to find it. Project Skydrop lives in the lineage of the “armchair treasure hunts” of the much more modern era, where someone hides a treasure, shares cryptic clues, and challenges anyone to solve the puzzle and nab the loot. The painter Kit Williams is credited with kicking off the trend in 1979, when he concealed the directions to a buried artifact—a golden hare—in the pages of his illustrated book, Masquerade. This he did mostly so that people would pay more attention to his pretty pictures. “Once they open that book,” he said in a radio interview, “they look and they look again.”
Rohrer insists that Project Skydrop, although it is intended to make him and Bailey some money, isn’t about anything more than itself. “It’s a self-contained thing,” he tells me. “It’s not trying to be a Trojan horse into your mind to get you to, you know, subscribe to our monthly coffee club or something.” He says he’s been thinking about a grand-scale, real-world treasure hunt ever since the middle of the pandemic, when he and his kids lugged a chest full of—
Well, wait. If I think about it, I’d say the story starts much earlier. Ever since dropping out of a PhD program at UC Santa Cruz—and then living frugally, on something like $9,000 a year, with wife and kid—Rohrer has wanted to make video games. After a couple of releases in the early 2000s, he found his first success in 2007, with the indie game Passage. Its premise was simple: You find yourself on a 16-pixel strip of green, moving through a maze to collect, yep, treasure chests. The game also had an emotional twist: Your character finds love, loses love, ages, and dies. Many players cried.
The games that followed weren’t treasure hunts, but in each, players searched for something: for family, for connection, for how to be a man (guard your home with guns, apparently—that one, The Castle Doctrine, was controversial). Twice, he made games where the game itself was the object of desire: In 2011, at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Rohrer won the Game Design Challenge, which that year asked developers to make a game “bigger than Jesus.” His entry was called Chain World. Exactly one copy of it existed, in the entire world, on a single memory stick. Once one player used up their life, they were meant to pass it on.
Then, in 2013, the conference founders invited past winners back for the 10th design challenge. The theme: Humanity’s Last Game. Many designers presented 10-minute PowerPoints about their theoretical creations. Rorher arrived onstage with a finished product, A Game for Someone. He’d spent the previous six weeks crafting a board game on his computer and then created an AI to play-test it and iterate on the rules. After that, he built the board and pieces out of titanium, wrote the rules in pictographs on acid-free paper, hermetically sealed them in a Pyrex tube, and buried it all in indestructible cases in the Nevada desert. He won first prize. A Game for Someone is still out there, waiting to be found.
Rohrer has been profiled by Esquire, The New Yorker, and this magazine. Passage is now part of the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 2018 he released One Hour One Life, which is considered his best game, and two years after that an AI chatbot called Project December, which became the subject of a viral article and a Sundance documentary.
But even with all of these successes, something had always nagged at Rohrer. He’d spent much of his childhood in the woods behind his home; now, all he did was sit at a computer. He struggled to sleep. A games journalist told me he yelled at her once for getting the name of one of his games wrong. There was a period where he alienated certain fans by making head-scratching posts about Covid, like saying the various health mandates were far more restrictive than the government’s response to AIDS. (“It wasn’t meant to be insensitive about AIDS,” Rohrer, a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, explains. “Just a comparison.”) Early in pandemic days—the Apocalypse, as he calls it—Rohrer knew he needed a change. So he and his wife and three sons moved across the country. They bought a home in Dover because of its big Free State Project community and its homeschooling scene. Rohrer started going outside more. Having adventures. Climbing mountains. “It’s like, Oh my God, my body feels so good right now,” he says. “And I have no anxiety.”
Now we’re back to fall of 2021, the more immediate precursor to Project Skydrop. After taking months off from working on games, Rohrer decided it’d be fun to host a little virtual-meets-real-world treasure hunt. He and his kids lugged a Civil War–era chest filled with $3,000 worth of antique silver coins to a state park near their house. Then, on Halloween, Rohrer snuck some clues, in the form of a cryptic poem, into One Hour One Life. He wasn’t sure anyone would actually solve the thing; the clues were set to disappear at the end of the day. But players banded together on Discord, created a Google spreadsheet, and decoded the poem in eight hours. “They went straight there on the morning of All Saints’ Day, found the treasure, and posted pictures in the Discord server,” Rohrer says.
It was fun. And frustrating. Rohrer couldn’t believe his puzzle had been so easy to solve. That’s when he seriously began studying treasure hunts as a “genre.” And as a genre, historically, they “kind of sucked,” he realized. They were either too easy or way too hard. It took people a few years to find Kit Williams’ golden hare, for instance. (Not to mention that the finder seemed to have had a leg up with inside information.) And, in the case of the infamous Fenn treasure, hidden by the Santa Fe–based art dealer Forrest Fenn in 2010, it took a full decade. “As a game designer,” Rohrer says, “my mind kind of latched onto that. How can we fix this format?” Project Skydrop began to take shape.
I have to ask Rohrer the obvious. Was the point of Project Skydrop to create something that—instead of locking people indoors—gets them outside, where they can experience the soothing splendor of the wilderness? Is this, in other words, the inevitable turn in a career that’s, as Rohrer himself puts it, “definitely past its midpoint”? In response, Rohrer pulls up the latest play stats for One Hour One Life, a game where you spawn as a baby and work to make a lasting mark during your short time in the world. He calculates that players have lived 12 million lives in the game, totaling some 3 million hours of collective playtime. “What could 3 million hours of human activity have accomplished?” he asks.
So yeah. He feels bad about that. Perhaps Project Skydrop can be his salvation. “A penance,” Rohrer agrees, grinning. “A penance.”
In conversation, Rohrer vibrates, long limbs jetting this way and that. To most of my questions, he responds with soliloquies that dart off into tangential streams before flowing back toward the point. In my many hours with him, I don’t think he sat still for more than a few minutes. Often, mid-sentence, he’d dash away to grab a relevant prop: a book, the bronze cast of the trophy, a sketch. Even the balm of the New Hampshire wilderness has not slowed Rohrer’s overactive motor.
He went at Project Skydrop as he would any game: obsessively. “Can I make, not the perfect treasure hunt,” he asked himself, “but a better treasure hunt? That doesn’t last 10 years and doesn’t last one day?” What if, he wondered, the hunt started at 10-year-level hard … and then, over time, got to one-day-level easy? Rohrer thought of Fortnite, where the area of the game shrinks as the battle rounds progress. That was it: The map, which he’d make public each day of the hunt, would include a progressively shrinking circle, starting at 500 miles across and ending as an outline of the treasure. And how many days until the exact location was pinpointed? “Three weeks is a pretty good timeline for a dramatic arc,” Rohrer says. “It seems long enough for people to feel like they have a chance, but not so long that everyone loses interest.”
Rohrer began sharing the idea with friends. One said that, without actual clues, the concept was completely flawed—the only compelling part would come at the very end, when the circle got tiny and utter chaos ensued. But Rohrer didn’t know how to create a puzzle that would be just hard enough to solve in a matter of weeks rather than days or years. He asked his friend Bailey to come on board, and they landed on the idea of adding in drone photography. Each day searchers would have the map and a slightly higher drone photo (in other words, a wider and wider view) of the hiding spot. Eventually, someone looking closely enough could find his treasure.
Another friend, David S. Goyer, the filmmaker and creator, most recently, of the Foundation series on Apple TV+, suggested that the hunt needed a storyline. “I think that helps people latch onto ideas,” Goyer wrote to me in an email. Rohrer mentioned Goyer’s idea to Bailey, and the two began playing around with possible narratives. Could the treasure have been planted by aliens? They also spent months thinking about the design of the treasure itself. They wanted something that looked like a treasure but didn’t pander to “Oh, this is pirate treasure.” They wanted a recognizable form so hunters could talk about, even fetishize, the object of their desire.
At one point, Bailey sketched an idea around a double helix shape. Rohrer liked it. He also decided that gold alone wouldn’t be enough of an enticement; the trophy should also, itself, lead to even greater riches. So he added a new puzzle: By spinning the top of the treasure around the base, the finder could decode a 12-word, “almost poetic-sounding” sentence that would, in turn, unlock a bitcoin wallet. As Rohrer created the cast and prepared to pour the gold, he realized that the treasure looked like Project Skydrop’s shrinking circles. “It kind of all fits together in the end,” he says. Minus the narrative idea. Aliens seemed lame, so they scratched that. There’d be no story. The game would be the draw.
Rohrer and Bailey met in high school in Akron, Ohio. During junior year, they played together in a band called Insect. Kind of. Bailey—who spent his twenties touring the world with his rock group Maxeen—actually played every instrument on the album; the other bandmates, Bailey says, “just weren’t good enough.”
Project Skydrop has been more collaborative. These last three years, the friends have spent hundreds of hours working on every aspect of their hunt. Their relationship is one where conversations about philosophy and the minutiae of design can last for hours or days. The script for their three-minute YouTube video took weeks to write and refine. They also hired a professional animator. “Cost more than the treasure,” Rohrer tells me.
Rohrer and Bailey are not shy about finances. Much as they see Project Skydrop as a vehicle to bring back “a childlike sense of wonder” (in Bailey’s framing) and “a sense of awe” (in Rohrer’s), it’s also supposed to make money. Half of the $20 entry fee goes to Rorher and Bailey, and the other half goes to the bitcoin wallet. It’ll take around 5,000 sign-ups to break even. If, as Rohrer hopes, 100,000 people sign up, both hiders and the successful seeker will be $1 million richer by the end. (As of press time, the number of sign-ups is paltry—a mere 17 people—but that’s because the details have been top secret until this morning.)
To reach that goal, they hired a public relations person to whet the public appetite (of course, stories like this one don’t hurt). They also need the hunt to go on long enough to capture late adopters. The biggest threat, the two know, is a so-called geopuzzler making a too-quick solve. Online sleuths have become expert at tracking down hidden objects through the smallest of clues. Rohrer and Bailey learned to avoid landmarks like rivers and roads (geopuzzling Reddits have helped them dodge this and other pitfalls). They’ve aimed the livestream camera at the ground to make sure airline flight paths don’t give the game away.
Then, the biggest issue: the matter of safety. You might expect Bailey, the rock star, to be the risk taker and Rohrer the worrier. It’s more the opposite. Both share a belief that, if consenting adults are not harming others, they should be able to do what they want. But Bailey tells me that, when it comes to their libertarian bent, Rohrer is “a bit more hard-lined. Or just kind of … ” He breathes in, perhaps because he doesn’t want to shit-talk his friend.
When I first spoke to Rohrer, I’d brought up the fact that five people died in pursuit of Forrest Fenn’s treasure. Treasure hunts are dangerous. Rohrer brushed it off. Later, he offered a hypothetical. “If I was an automobile manufacturer and somebody used the automobile I made to mow down a crowd of people,” he said, “I’d be sad that people got mowed down, and maybe a little bit embarrassed if it was a Rohrer, with my face on the hood ornament. But I wouldn’t feel personally responsible for having made the car in the first place. I would feel like, ‘You know who really sucks? Who’s a real asshole? The person who is driving this car into people.’ I’m not an asshole for having made cars.”
Rohrer emphasizes that the treasure will be a simple hike in the woods not far from the road. I ask if he’s afraid they’ll get sued. He says he wasn’t going to not make something cool because of what could go wrong. So no, not worried. He has represented himself in court before and won. (Officials in the upstate New York village he was living in at the time ticketed him for refusing to cut his overgrown lawn.) Project Skydrop only has one rule, he stresses, and the rule is clear: The prize is void if you spill the blood of “your fellow man” to nab it. But surely, I press, the lure of a possible cool million will entice treasure seekers to take risks? Rohrer tells me that, to play the game correctly, you check your email, look at a photograph, study satellite maps, drive to a location, and then hike. That’s it. “The East Coast of the United States,” he says, “is pretty safe.”
At one point in one of our talks, Rohrer lifted a fountain pen from his desk. “There’s a whole world of fountain pen enthusiasts, blogs, and probably even print magazines about fountain pens. There’s leaders of the community, and there’s upheavals and schisms in the fountain pen world,” he says. “I like fountain pens well enough. I write with them, right?” No argument here: Pens are great. “But I feel like there’s something about these niche communities that is, I don’t know, limiting in terms of how much impact you’re really having on the world.”
The thing about making indie video games for a living, Rohrer means, is that they won’t make a dent beyond their small audience. Plus, he adds, he’s tired of talking about his work to people—strangers, friends, even family members—who won’t actually engage with it. Project Skydrop, he hopes, will be different. “This is happening in the real world,” he says. He also believes he can deliver a sublime moment for the eventual winner—beautiful, resonant, life-altering. Basically, a game that delivers the experience of great art.
Will it? As we all drive home after a long day of hiding treasure, the conversation peppered with dick jokes and movie references, I think back to the first treasure Rohrer buried: A Game for Someone. He designed that game to be found, and played, by people thousands of years in the future, an idea so out-there it landed Rohrer the first solo museum retrospective for a video game designer. After a bit of investigation and a call to the curator, I had learned that, as part of the exhibit in 2016, Rorher had hidden a new map, another one, to locate the buried game. The detail surprised me. It appeared to undercut the central premise, shifting the search timeline from distant-future societies to current museumgoers. When I’d asked Rohrer about it, he laughed and shook his head. “I mean, putting the clue in there was basically just a betrayal of myself and everything I stood for,” he said.
Now, blindfolded again, in the back of an SUV, the answer starts to feel like a dodge. There’s beauty in a game that could take thousands of years to find. But then there’s also just silence and waiting. No glory. No opportunity to witness the moment you meticulously crafted. With Project Skydrop, Rohrer has spent countless hours and a small fortune on another treasure hunt. So, why go to these lengths to hide a treasure in the forest? To be found.
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