It is the romance of adventure that leads to the search for treasure. Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked that a man who had not hunted treasure as a boy was never a child.

Where can treasure be found? It can be sought in the woods by the light of the moon or in the burning sun of a tropical beach. It can be dug up with a spade, a plow, or a 12 ton steam shovel. It may be found behind the barn in your own backyard, stumbled over on the distant shores of some palm-fringed isle, or located in the clear blue water with a glass bottomed boat.

With maps or without, with carefully planned expeditions or strolling the beach, with willow wands or a metal detector, bountiful treasure awaits you. Some of the costliest professional expeditions in history have turned up nothing, while amateurs digging for the first time have uncovered thousands in cash.

Mention treasure and visions appear of pirate’s loot and sunken galleons loaded with gold. But modern-day treasure hunting is not imaginary. It is active and alive. As this is written, expeditions working all over the globe are tramping the shores or gliding under the sea in search of billions of dollars of treasure that are lost or hidden.

Hunting treasure is not work but a fascinating kind of play. It appeals to that strain of childishness in all of us even though our reputation be starched and conservative. It is, after all, an inherited taste handed down from our ancestors. The folklore of almost every race, every generation, is rich in buried treasure stories. The pirate with his stout sea chest hidden above high watermark is lineally descended from the enchanting characters who lived in the shadow land of myth and fable. The hoard of Captain Kidd has become as legendary as the dream of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Since 1980 there have been dozens of treasure hunt games in various forms. The book “Masquerade” really started it all. What was intended to be just a children’s fairy tale was later discovered to hold clues to a treasure located in Great Britain. It offered a spectacular jewel-laden “golden hare” that had a value of $20,000. It was a short book (32 pages including illustrations) but because it was first it was very successful.

But only a few of these treasure hunts had actual hidden treasures. The majority of the hunts were difficult puzzles that described a location. Other noted hunts included “in Search of The Golden Horse”, “The Inheritance”, “Treasure - In Search of Understanding”, and “Treasure Quest.” However, all of these former games, despite their popularity, lacked a real mainstream approach and direction. Though they used various marketing (books, videos, CD-ROM, even laser-disc, etc.), almost all of the hunts lost tremendous perceived value because of a very high degree of game difficulty. In fact unless you were a brilliant code breaker or a member of Mensa, you would have an extraordinarily difficult time progressing in the hunt because some of these games had as many as 1,000 clues. With hundreds of cryptic messages and other difficult clues, games like these kept only a very small percentage of readers truly engaged once they started playing the game.

In our own marketing research with a small test sample of people who enjoy games, and analyzing some of these former treasure hunts, 95% of all participants weren’t able to identify clues or process information, and didn’t have the expertise to advance in these games. So, from this research, Ross Martin kept some of the exciting ideas of these previous hunts along with his own full time experience of searching Captain Kidd’s original clues to create the greatest treasure hunt game of all time.