JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In mid-September, a video game designer and a musician hid a golden trophy somewhere in the forests of the Northeastern U.S. and kicked off a massive treasure hunt. There's prize money, too - more than $80,000. It's called Project Skydrop. NPR's Kai McNamee joined the hunt.
KAI MCNAMEE, BYLINE: By the time I had even heard about Project Skydrop, thousands of people had already been analyzing clues and hitting the trails, scouring the forest floor for treasure.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The treasure is somewhere in this circle.
MCNAMEE: This is from a video explaining the setup of the game. It shows a map of the Eastern U.S. with a circle spanning an area from roughly New Hampshire all the way to Washington, D.C.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: But don't worry. They tell me it's going to get smaller.
MCNAMEE: Over the course of three weeks, the width of the circle shrinks from 500 miles to just one foot. Every day, you also get an aerial photo showing more and more of the forest surrounding the prize. The treasure is a gold trophy, a stack of gold rings that looks like a spring. It comes with a code to redeem a pot of prize money that grows as people join.
When I signed up, the search area was down to a 95-mile-wide circle centered on Western Massachusetts. I went to Google Maps, thinking if I clicked around, maybe I could line up the aerial shots with the circle and pinpoint where the treasure was before heading out into the woods. It was exciting at first. I was searching for gold treasure.
But there's so much forest in a 95-mile circle. And to me, it all looked the same. The circle was still way too big, and I soon realized that as it got smaller, it'd get easier not just for me but for everyone else, too. Within a few hours, I went from feeling super-stoked to feeling completely hopeless. So I called up some other treasure hunters to ask how their searches were going.
Are you hopeful that you'll find it?
JARED LYON: Oh, no, I'm not hopeful.
MCNAMEE: Jared Lyon, 46, from Rochester, N.Y. - Lyon is very involved in the online treasure-hunter community.
LYON: I've been doing these things for so long. I mean, some of the past ones, you know - one took, I think, 17 years to be found.
MCNAMEE: Hunter Apteker, a 25-year-old from New Salem, Mass., was more hopeful about his chances. And he still had that burning sense of adventure I had quickly lost.
HUNTER APTEKER: I grew up a huge "Indiana Jones" guy, so I think this kind of might have struck a little childhood memory inside of me.
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APTEKER: I got a memory of when my cousin used to help babysit. We'd set up a little, gold statue in the corner of the room, take off all the couch cushions and make our own kind of Temple of Doom. It's interesting to have something like this. You get to put yourself in those shoes and live out those childhood memories.
TOM BAILEY: As we were talking about movies like "Indiana Jones" or adventure films...
JASON ROHRER: Or "The Goonies" was - yeah.
BAILEY: Or "The Goonies." Yeah. So we had a lot of inspiration from that.
MCNAMEE: That's Tom Bailey and Jason Rohrer, the creators of Project Skydrop. Rohrer is a video game designer, and Bailey is a musician. They grew up together and have been creative partners on the project. They say at the end of the day, the treasure hunt is about creating a real-life adventure. Here's Rohrer.
ROHRER: We're trying to cultivate this feeling of kind of wonder and awe. The interesting thing about Project Skydrop compared to the other treasure hunts is it goes through this kind of arc of unsolvable to solvable gradually over time.
MCNAMEE: This design, he says, is supposed to ratchet up the tension toward the end and create an exciting mad scramble for the treasure. But only 13 days in, someone found it, a meteorologist from Massachusetts named Dan Leonard. Still, a lot of the participants I talked to said they didn't necessarily need to find treasure to enjoy the game.
MICHAL STRAWBRIDGE: I have found lots of really great mushrooms (laughter). I found cool insects. I've seen amazing things.
MCNAMEE: Michal Strawbridge, a 45-year-old living in Tyringham, Mass.
STRAWBRIDGE: Like, today I went out, and there was a good, strong wind that blew through the trees, and all the leaves started slowly falling down. And it was absolutely magical.
MCNAMEE: I talked to her before the treasure was found, and she said she was just happy people were getting out into nature. Project Skydrop is continuing with a competition for second place. The runners-up won't get the gold or the jackpot, but maybe the real treasure is the experiences we have along the way.
Kai McNamee, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "THE RAIDERS MARCH") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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