This popular mobile game wants players to help recover lost Revolutionary War treasures
Mobile Game Players Help Recover Revolutionary War Treasures
This popular mobile game wants players to become part of a real-world history quest. A widely enjoyed mobile title is now inviting its community to help locate and potentially recover lost artifacts from the American Revolution. The initiative connects entertainment with historical preservation, giving millions of players a chance to contribute to finding physical relics that have been missing for centuries.
Hidden Object Game Meets Historical Discovery
Wooga, a Berlin-based development studio, created the free-to-play hidden object experience called June’s Journey. The app has gathered more than fifty million downloads on Google Play alone. Players step into the shoes of June Parker, an amateur detective exploring 1920s New York City while solving mysteries through clue collection.
The studio has teamed up with museums, galleries, academic historians, and descendants of original artifact owners. Together they selected several important historical pieces to feature inside the game temporarily. One standout discovery is an eighteenth-century medal given to General Daniel Morgan after his triumph over British troops at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina in 1781. This medal was stolen from a secure bank vault and had not been seen for over two hundred years.
A Movie Moment Sparked the Idea
The project’s concept came from a lucky encounter with the 1999 children’s film Stuart Little. In 2009, Hungarian art historian Gergely Barki watched the movie with his daughter and spotted a familiar painting in the background. He identified it as Róbert Berény’s Sleeping Lady with Black Vase, which had vanished decades before. Barki contacted the filmmakers and discovered a set designer had bought the artwork at a California antiques shop without knowing its worth. The designer later sold it to a private collector who eventually returned the painting to Hungary for auction.
Ben O’Donnell, the game director for June’s Journey, shared that this true recovery story made his team wonder if placing missing objects into interactive media could produce similar outcomes. He pointed out that the game mainly attracts female players and performs especially well in the United States. The team saw the approaching 250th anniversary of the nation as the ideal timing for this integration.
“A lot of people wrote and said ‘we’d love to have this or that person’s coat or musket or who knows what document.’ These are items we know existed at the time of the revolution but we don’t know if they survived,” said Don Hagist, an author and historian who helped curate the list of artifacts.
Expert Guidance for Artifact Selection
To maintain accuracy, Wooga brought on Don Hagist, managing editor of the Journal of the American Revolution, to steer the selection process. Hagist consulted with the journal’s contributors to pinpoint items known to exist during the revolutionary era but with uncertain current locations. The game will showcase several specific objects, including a section of King George III’s royal coat of arms from Philadelphia’s historic Christ Church, a place visited by both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Though most of the symbol was removed by patriots when the conflict began, one surviving third remains at the church today.
Players will also come across one of two engraved cannons surrendered during the Battles of Saratoga on September 19 and October 7, 1777. These cannons later served in defending the early United States before disappearing in 1813 after British and Canadian forces recaptured Ogdensburg, New York. Other hidden treasures include an embroidered textile showing the former New Jersey estate of General William Alexander, known as Lord Stirling, and a red British military coat last recorded in Connecticut in 1901.
“The idea of incorporating these things into a medium millions of people will see is brilliant,” Hagist remarked regarding the project.
While not every item appears directly in gameplay, a dedicated webpage lists additional missing pieces for players to explore online.
