Coleseum

Coleseum is a small arena combat game from the developer credited as MagicTouch in which the player builds a team of fighters, pits them against a series of opponents, and ultimately faces the Devil himself in a climactic final bout. It was distributed through Info-Mac as info-mac/game/arc/coleseum.hqx.

Build a team, climb the ladder

The core loop is team management followed by bouts: assemble a roster, send fighters into the arena, and progress through increasingly difficult opponents. The readme bills the experience as roughly three days of entertainment for a full run.

The save-file caveat

Coleseum's save system writes 24 separate 1K files per save. The author explicitly warns players to save sparingly so as not to clutter the disk, an artifact of the resource-fork-heavy storage habits of mid-1990s Mac shareware.

Authorship and distribution

The release is signed only by the handle MagicTouch. Like many small Info-Mac arcade entries it carried no formal publisher and relied on the Sumex mirror network and later Macintosh Garden for redistribution.

Running it today

The .hqx package decodes to a classic Mac application and runs under Mini vMac, Basilisk II, or SheepShaver with a System 7 or Mac OS 8/9 ROM. The 24-file save quirk is harmless inside a disk image.