Cover Stories was a minicomp in which artists contributed cover art in the first half, and then in the second half authors chose covers they liked and wrote games to fit them. A lot of cool covers were submitted, not all of which got used (alas).
The comp followed the lead of the Apollo 18 Tribute Album project in that it explicitly incorporated a time period for beta-testing and encouraged authors to beta one another’s work. I really like this model, and it seems to result in more consistently polished output than some of the other models. The term “minicomp” isn’t entirely applicable, since it’s really more like a mutually edited anthology, but I’m not going to quibble too much.
I’ve posted reviews of a number of the Cover Stories games I played on IFDB. I especially recommend Olivia’s Orphanorium, a dark comedy about managing a Dickensian orphanage, and Home Sweetie-Bot Home, which rather surprisingly includes a voice-recognition feature allowing you to play the game via speech.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 