Freeing Dev Hunter from Excel 2000

Dev Hunter is a small game hidden inside Microsoft Excel 2000. It was one of the few pastimes I had during the dull computer classes I sat through in high school, and, like all adults who grow nostalgic for the things they had when they were young, I eventually went looking for it again.

This post is the whole story of chasing it down: first getting the game to run on its own outside of Excel, and then — years later — freeing it completely, into a standalone program that carries nothing of Excel with it at all.