Deathly Duel

Deathly Duel is a 2000 side-scrolling sword-fighting game from Spilled Software, programmed by Alexander Wallace and distributed through Info-Mac. The pitch is exactly as the developer's own abstract puts it: "Grab a sword and slash your opponent to bits with this fun side-scroller dueling game."

Gameplay

Two armed fighters face off on a side-scrolling stage, trading sword strokes until one of them collapses. The genre is closer to the one-on-one duelling style of Karateka or the original Prince of Persia than to a full beat-em-up: a single opponent at a time, melee range, no projectiles, with the side-scrolling camera giving each duel room to move.

Developer and release

The credit line - "(c)2000 Spilled Software" with author Alexander Wallace at superboy654@email.com - places this firmly in the late hobbyist-shareware era of Mac OS Classic, when one-person studios published one-off arcade titles directly to Info-Mac and similar archives. Spilled Software has no surviving website of record beyond this submission.

Engine and platform notes

Distributed as a single BinHex 4.0 archive (deathly-duel.hqx) under info-mac/game/. The package is a Classic Mac OS application; no PPC-only or Carbon flag is announced in the header, so the title is most reliably run on a System 7 - Mac OS 9 host or under SheepShaver / Basilisk II emulation.

Provenance

There is no Macintosh Garden entry, no MobyGames record, and no contemporary review trail for Deathly Duel. The BinHex header authored by Alexander Wallace is the canonical preserved description; everything else surfaced in this catalogue is inferred from genre and release-date norms of the year-2000 Mac shareware scene.