Contrary to what it's name seems to indicate (which should probably
be understood in the sense of Magritte's famous painting),
this is indeed Othello, and quite an interesting
one.
TAO was written 1986 by Gary A. Thompson, then an undergraduate at the University of Southern Louisiana in Lafayette majoring in Computer Science, with the goal to entertain as well as to teach. The source code was available on both CompuServe and GEnie, but I doubt it can be found anywhere any more.
Many elements of the Mac interface were incorporated in this program, including a modeless-style dialog supporting the Edit menu, as well as a Caution box with a filter allowing keyboard input of Y and N.
TAO is one of the first true desktop games on the Macintosh. Therefore it displays fairly well on larger screens, or color screens. Still I preferred by far to play it on my Macintosh SE.
The AI is rather pathetic. There are three "brain" levels, Smart, Semi-intelligent, and Just plain dumb, but Smart is grayed out for some reason, and on Semi-intelligent I beat it every time without problems. A good deal of the fun of the game are the constant insults the computer player heaps on you. You can choose between Nice and Downright Obnoxious alert mode, but the first is boring and not recommended. If you have it installed, the game can even insult you via Macintalk!
