I mean, games are an incredible medium, but I think books can blur the line as well. I think "S." is probably the best example. It's not a traditional gamebook (which would be cheating since they're explicitly games), but it is a physical book which presents itself as an artifact of the story it's telling (it's produced to look like an old library book written by a fictional author with notes in the margins between fictional characters).

It's really three stories in one: the story of what happened to the fictional author, the story of two characters trying to unravel that mystery, leaving notes in the margins and clippings inserted into the book, and the story written in the book itself.

But in a sense it requires readers to become creators by connecting the clues linking the three stories and determining what happened, thus completing the story for themselves.

Another example I grew up with was "The Eleventh Hour" which is an illustrated children's book with ciphers and puzzles and a main mystery for the reader to unravel. This is a bit more traditionally "gamey" than "S.".

You could also argue religion is a form of this, especially Judeo-Christian religions which have sacred texts but also millenia of extra-textual canon and tradition.

EDIT: didn't read until the end of your comment before I posted my answer, and now I don't know how to change it, so I'll just leave it like it is...

Makes me wonder if it’s better to go solo than to hire people worse than you.

Make sure to play it with a Roland MT32 emulator, sounds much better that way.

But yeah, a sneak-thief has the opportunity to enjoy the most of the game's writing, in the form of emails, data cubes and overheard conversations, and they just make the world so much richer and more alive. And all the allusions and pop culture references, the excerpts of the (real) novel The Man Who Was Thursday, exploring several themes common with the game, as well as the (fictional) thriller Jacob's Shadow, whose plot seems to reflect the player's progression in the game. No doubt Deus Ex is one of the most intellectual, literary video games of all time.

For a trip down the memory lane, I recommend Stephan Lavavej's¹ Deus Ex page which, among other things, contains an annotated copy of all the non-dialogue text in the game: https://nuwen.net/dx.html

¹ Some of us may also recognize his name as the principal maintainer of Microsoft's C++ Standard Library implementation.

I don't know if I'd call it the best game of that era, but I think it's a strong contender for most influential. It goes beyond the obvious homages (e.g. the variety of games that put the code "0451" in a prominent place). Deus Ex blended actual agency with illusory agency in a way that almost every western narrative-driven game since then has tried to replicate, with varying degrees of success. It's one of the few games where I knew I didn't really have much control over the story, but it made me feel like a character in it anyway.

Only because Quake III had just come out.

Well, that's not the way he sees himself, from the article,

> People have appreciated the work my teams and I have done and have expressed it loudly and affectionately. I may or may not deserve accolades, but I've been lucky enough to receive them and I'm grateful for all the kind words and well-wishes I've received. Maybe it's just my ego, but what I consider to be my successes have nothing to do with reviews, sales or revenue. Success for me is connection with players (and not in the data-collecting way some of you may be thinking). I've had people send me handmade plush toys based on characters in my games. I've had people send me artwork they were inspired to create. I've had people tell me a game I worked on helped get them through chemotherapy. Autism. Cerebral palsy. I ran into a young woman at Disneyland dressed as Ortensia, in a homemade costume, before the character was a star in the Disney firmament. “I started my company because of your game,” I’ve been told. And “I changed the way I thought about design because of a game you worked on.” Now those are success criteria that have kept me going, even when things got tough.

What he seems to care about the most is that his work has an impact on the players in some way - which I think is the goal of many artists.

FWIW, Deus Ex was made during the unlimited time/unlimited budget years of ION Storm. The later games had various problems (often due to constraints of making them work on consoles) but the first Deus Ex is almost perfect

The ACMI interview is here for anyone curious: https://youtu.be/U2VEY5o6VQc

I think that was the 3rd entry in franchise,not the first one?

This seems to go counter to modern practices, which is to not bother with content at all at the start, and to "find the fun" in a gray box level first.

Are you sure you’re talking about the right guy?

'scool!