Games.net

On the internet, a horrible image or lame design is fleeting. When a bad gaming magazine cover hits the shelves, its mediocrity lives forever.

A recent ESA report shows that there are over five squillion Internet sites covering game news -- yet a small cluster of print game magazines continues to lurk around bookstore shelves, searching for readers. How do they stick around, despite lead times that make it impossible for them to cover the industry in anything like a timely manner? A lot of it is sheer momentum. Magazines like EGM and Game Informer have been around for so long, and made such well-established names for themselves, that thousands are still willing to shell out $4.95 $5.95 a month to discover what their writers think about video games -- a pretty inconsequential subject, really, in the great scheme of things.

Wooops.

Of course, the flip side is that every magazine has a few skeletons in their closets. Flashy covers devoted to games that wound up becoming the laughingstock of the net forums for years to come. Feature ideas that seemed to work a lot better in the bar after the fifth Black and Tan. Graphic design straight out of Teach Yourself Photoshop in 14 Days. And unlike websites, you can't just delete your past embarrassments -- they're still there today, just as vivid as they were a decade ago. (EGM still gets flak to this day for touting "Streeets of Rage 3" on the cover of a 1994 issue.)

The twelve game-mag covers you're about to see feature the worst of the worst, the most terrifying things to ever stalk the racks. Proceed on at your own peril!

Table of Contents

12. Game Informer, December 2003

Ah, the Generic Army Dude. You've seen a lot of him on game-mag covers lately -- black, white, bald, wearing goggles or futuristic armor, either staring at you somberly or screaming his head off.

Magazine editors secretly dread designing covers for military or sci-fi games these days because it's so hard to make a unique cover out of the art they get. The heroes all look like Arnie or Vin Diesel (assuming a helmet isn't covering their heads entirely), and every cover for games with this graphical style could almost be used interchangeably with each other. GI makes a noble effort here to cover up Generic Army Dude's friends as much as possible with brain-crushing text (Yes, we're confused. Congratulations.), but the net effect is still yawn-inducing.

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