Fresh Find: Lost Treasure of Lima, a New Game Boy Hunt for a Very Real Fortune

Most treasure-hunt games invent their loot. This one did not have to. Lost Treasure of Lima, a brand-new Game Boy cartridge pressed in 2024, sends you digging for a fortune that genuinely existed, genuinely disappeared, and has never been found in more than two hundred years of searching.

The loot in this game is real, and still buried somewhere off Costa Rica.

What It Is

The game is a Broke Studio release developed by drgd_retro. You play the adventurer Sebastian Madsen across four levels of environmental puzzles, exploration and race-against-the-clock chases, all in search of the long-lost treasure. It is a modern homebrew title sold as a proper boxed cartridge, and like the other Broke Studio games in the collection it runs on the original 1989 Game Boy, the DMG-01, as well as the Color and the Advance.

The Treasure That Was Actually Real

Here is where it gets good. The Treasure of Lima was real. In 1820, as the wars of independence closed in on Spanish Peru, the church treasure of Lima, gold and silver, jewelled candlesticks and two life-size solid-gold statues of the Virgin and Child, was loaded onto a merchant ship, the Mary Dear, to be carried to safety in Mexico. The captain entrusted with it, William Thompson, made a different decision. He and his crew turned pirate, killed the guards and priests on board, and sailed instead to Cocos Island off Costa Rica, where they are said to have buried the lot.

Thompson was soon captured. To save his neck he offered to lead the Spanish to the treasure, then slipped away into the island's jungle and was never seen again. The hoard, worth something like 160 million pounds in today's money, has never been recovered.

A brand-new 2024 Game Boy cartridge, pressed by hand in France.

That has not stopped people trying. Cocos Island has drawn hundreds of expeditions over the past century and a half, among them the German adventurer August Gissler, who lived on the island for nearly twenty years hunting for it, the explorer Frank Worsley of Shackleton's Antarctic voyage, and even the American gangster Bugsy Siegel. Every one of them went home empty-handed, which is exactly what makes the legend such good material for a game.

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From Legend to Cartridge

There is a local footnote too. This is the very game the museum watched being manufactured for its piece on Broke Studio's Homebrew Factory, the workshop in rural France that presses new Game Boy cartridges by hand. If you want to see how a game like this goes from raw code to a shrink-wrapped box, that story is told in the article on the factory.

You can find Lost Treasure of Lima in the collection, where it is fully catalogued, sitting on the shelf beside its Broke Studio stablemates Fortified Zone 2 and Inspector Waffles: Early Days.