Six Questions with Lukas Stanley: Creator of Digital Buried Treasure Hunt with $1,000 Prize

It’s always exciting to learn of a new treasure hunt! I have to thank fellow Forrest Fenn searcher, Jason Dent, for alerting me to this puzzling fun. And of course, a huge thanks to Lukas, creator of the Digital Buried Treasure Hunt, for taking time to answer a few questions about the awesome Quest he has given us all the opportunity to go on!

As you will read he is a busy and very talented person. It’s sure to be an exciting venture. The Treasure Hunt is provided free via the Buried Treasure’s YouTube Channel. Be sure to check out not only this treasure hunt channel, but also his other websites, Lukas Stanley and The Founding Band. Follow/subscribe!

But let’s learn more about the treasure hunt! Might you be able to discover the two keys to claim the $1,000 prize!

Enjoy!

Six Questions with Lukas:

• 1Q) I love how you present the Quest; sitting casually in a room filled with items- that I’m sure have us all wondering if clues are there or not- and reading the Riddle. Very professional and excellently done. What inspired you to create such a hunt?

First of all, thank you so much Jenny for your interest in my treasure hunt and for taking the time to help bring more attention to it! There were several influences that eventually culminated in the idea for this hunt. I had just recently re-read Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. In this fictional novel, there is a large treasure hunt for a prize valued at billions of dollars, and the whole thing takes place in a virtual reality world. The book combines elements of modern day gaming, the impact of the internet on our social structures, and 80’s pop culture.

As someone who loves both games and technology, this book was a thrilling adventure. Shortly after I had read it for the second time, about two years ago, I became briefly interested in learning about other real-life treasure hunts. At this point, I discovered hunts like the Forrest Fenn treasure, and absorbed a lot of material on the topic.

However, due to the fact that I’m a busy person and have limited resources for travel, I was never able to go physically looking for this or any other famous treasure, although the idea is intriguing. My own limitations here were influential in the idea to create a treasure hunt that is truly an “armchair” hunt from start to finish – not only can the riddle be solved from the comfort of your chair, but the treasure can actually be retrieved from there as well. I wanted to create a hunt that everyone could participate in, no matter their age or limitations.

• 2Q) What did you find most challenging in crafting the Riddle? How long would you say it took you to finalize and have it say (and not say) what you wanted it to? Are you surprised no one has solved the Riddle and claimed the treasure yet?

The main challenge of creating the riddle was to make something that was the right level of difficulty. I needed it to be challenging because I didn’t want someone to solve it on day one, but at the same time I don’t necessarily want it to take years for someone to find either. Once I had that idea for the hunt, things progressed very quickly. I spent about two or three days brainstorming and crafting the riddle, and then a couple weeks testing it on close family and friends to verify the difficulty. I did tweak some things during that time, but ultimately the first draft was pretty close to the final draft.

I’m not too surprised that no one has solved the riddle yet – I think it is difficult enough that it is most likely to be solved once a small community of people has formed to bounce ideas off of each other and come to the right conclusions about the meaning of different parts of the riddle. It’s certainly possible for one person to solve it without help, but I expect it would take longer. At the point of writing this the riddle has been published for about three weeks, and while it’s hard to guess how long it will take, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes at least several months of people working on it pretty regularly to find the treasure.

• 3Q) Would you be able to rate the hunt’s difficulty? For instance, does someone have to be knowledgeable about computer codes or some other specific areas of expertise? Can anyone of common knowledge solve it?

That’s a good question. On a scale of 1-10, this hunt is probably a 6-7 and yes, anyone with common knowledge can solve it. I have been asked about whether a person needs to be especially fluent in computing or coding, and the answer is no. The line “Two keys unlock the chest of gold / That’s made of ones and zeroes” simply refers to the fact that the treasure is stored digitally, not that it requires a knowledge of binary language to retrieve it. So there are no areas in which a person needs to be a complete expert, but it will will require hunters to be a little bit knowledgeable in many different areas, like any good treasure hunt.

The thing I like about this is that anyone who can use the internet will more or less be able to find what they are looking for, and it is also the reason that working collaboratively with others might help speed up the process, because everyone will approach the hunt with a different set of knowledge.

• 4Q) Had you worked on other armchair treasure hunts before creating Digital Buried Treasure?

Besides my previous interest and research on the Forrest Fenn treasure, I have not worked on any. Which I think makes sense actually. Digital Buried Treasure was born out of my inability to invest time and money to travel around the country looking for physical buried treasure, and I wanted to provide that complete experience for free to anyone with an internet connection. I would very much enjoy working on solving other hunts eventually though!

• 5Q) I have to ask about the items on your shelf behind you in the video. Not for asking if there are clues there—because I see in comments below the hunt’s video you already answered, ‘no comment to that’ and assured us the Riddle alone is sufficient to solve the puzzle. But as a collector of games (and books), and seeing lots on the shelves, I have to ask what are some of your favorite games and books?

When I was younger, my favorite series was Harry Potter – I feel like that’s almost a cliche answer, but I’ve read the whole series probably 15 times. I still re-read them on occasion, and the magic has never been lost to me. Also, the book I mentioned earlier, Ready Player One, has been especially influential to me. Not only has it helped inspire this hunt, but it has convinced me and many others of the importance of virtual reality to the future of technology.

I am a very competitive person, and love playing games. My family plays a lot of card games like Euchre and Poker, but I’ve also really enjoyed the games recently like The Resistance by Don Eskridge and Codenames by Vlaada Chvátil. Settlers of Catan is also always a good fallback when there is nothing new to play! Outdoor competitions are also fun – tennis, baseball, ladderball, frisbee. I’ve always loved a good game, and I enjoy discovering the thing that makes a game tick, or that makes it really enjoyable to play.

I’ve been casually designing games since middle school – nothing that’s ever turned into a serious project, but I have rules written up for board games and yard games, I’ve written code for mobile games – it’s something I really enjoy. This hunt is very much in line with all of that, and I hope that it brings together players from all over to compete for the prize.

• 6Q) When not making Digital Buried Treasure Hunts, what else do you enjoy doing? Do you have future plans for making more treasure hunts?

I’m a musician by trade – I teach orchestral string instruments as well as piano. I perform a lot with a folk band called The Founding, which I co-founded with my friend Joel when we were college students. I also write music for video games. On top of all that, I’m working on a degree in computer science with an emphasis on game development, and I would love to work in the virtual/augmented reality field eventually.

I definitely hope to be able to create more of these riddles once the first treasure has been found, and I already have ideas for a second riddle! The best case scenario would be that someone finds the first prize at a point when there is enough interest in it that a sequel is warranted. If the first hunt doesn’t gain a substantial audience, it would make a sequel less imminent, but not impossible. Already it has received pretty good levels of interest, accumulating over a thousand views on YouTube in three weeks on a brand new channel. It was very fun to put this first riddle together, and it’s just as thrilling for me to watch people work on solving the riddle as it hopefully is for them to hunt for the prize!

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Thanks so much Lukas! Awesome answers and it is great to get to know more about the creator behind the Digital Treasure Hunt. For myself, it makes it all the more real and exciting. I appreciate you taking the time to answer the above Six Questions, and best of luck with all that you do! Now off to solve your puzzling Riddle and discover the treasure! Thanks again!

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