Bob's Dragon Hunt

Development and distribution

Bob's Dragon Hunt ran under an engine the developers referred to as VirtualDungeon; in the info file they promise releases of three more VirtualDungeon games within weeks: Anthill, Night on Bald Mountain, and Crystal Deception. Despite even ordering information being available for that last, all that ever turned up was one more VirtualDungeon title, that first, now re-named AntKill.

Peculiarly, this product was distributed bundled with SW-TALK.EXE, "the Voice Library",

a new product designed to be used by shareware authors. This is the first packages [sic] that enable [sic] you to reproduce real human speech thru [sic] the PC speaker and add them [sic] to your programs.

It was invoked in the batch file that started the game, and when it was run would bewilder players by first addressing them through their PC speaker (which they ordinarily would only expect bleeps and bloops out of), making irrelevant remarks such as "Wow!" "Way to go!" and "You got it!" before any gameplay had occurred. Following this jarring introduction, the grating PC speaker rendition of the theme to Monty Python's Flying Circus while the game started was practically soothing.

On top of its download-from-shareware-BBSes distribution, Bob's Dragon Hunt was also distributed through the SynTax shareware-on-floppies-by-mail service, on diskette number 1143, along with Homicide, Ohio Adventure, and a demo of Maddog Williams.

According to the developer Bob Kemp, in a message submitted to MobyGames:

AntKill and Bob's Dragon Hunt were free teasers. We sold the full dungeon titled the Crystal Deception by mail order. We did work on the graveyard game, but never released it. We ported Dragon Hunt to windows 3.1 when it came out too, but I don't remember if we ever let it out. It was a lot of fun even for we who made it. All the dungeons and monsters were randomly created.