The Antagonists

50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
(This article commissioned for and initially published in Incredibly Strange Games.)

Each title in the series would be a full printed book containing a dossier of stories and documents from a fictional world, ending with the source code listing for a game that could only be completed after thoroughly understanding that world.
[...]
The book part of The Antagonists presents itself as a collection of documents curated by one Albert Renshaw, the last human survivor on an Earth conquered by giant plants and enormous insects (the antagonists).
[...]
The fictional documents in the book are crenelated with introductions and afterwards, notes from scholars, and corrections from later editors.
[...]
When the connection between book and game works, The Antagonists can be a unique kind of fun: a story told simultaneously in two media, the player tasked with navigating both together. But the balance proves hard to maintain, and most of the blame for this stems from the need to keep the game small enough that its source code could be published in a book.
[...]
Scouring archives of computer game magazines from the year or so after its release, I could find only a single review, which summarized the project as "an interesting and highly informative book supporting unimaginative and somewhat primitive software."

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