Feature: The 12 Best Game Magazine Covers! Subscribe to this RSS feed
Whether it's excellent artwork, innovative design, or a gutsy choice that paid off, these 12 gaming covers are shining examples of what gaming magazines are capable of.
As discussed several weeks ago in The 12 Worst Game Magazine Covers Ever!, the permanence of print media can be a tricky thing to work with. If you make a regrettable mistake -- such as, oh, putting an Army Men title on the cover (like Nintendo Power did) -- the embarrassment is there for all eternity, festering in the bookshelves and toilet-sides of America, always threatening to come out of the woodwork and raid the dreams of hapless editors.
You can't ever take this back, Nintendo Power.
But with game mags, if you hit it big, you can really hit it out of the park. Special features on game-media websites (just like this one, in fact) get cycled off the front page after a week, at most. With a magazine, that feature can last forever -- or, at least, until you bundle the stack up and take it to the recyclers. A nice-looking cover doesn't just generate positive buzz for the game it's devoted to; it helps you remember the magazine itself. And while a cover's main purpose in life is to get you to buy the magazine off the newsstand, it's the really pretty ones that stick out in your mind five years after the fact.
The following 12 magazines are signs of what game mags can do when they're at their very best*. Hopefully they'll convince you that print mags aren't completely dead yet. (They're probably overdue for a shakeup...but that's another story.)
* Note that I stuck with US magazines for this feature. Otherwise, I'd just select 12 random issues of UK magazine Edge and call it a day, and that doesn't make for effective feature-writing.
Table of Contents
Page 1....Numbers 12, 11, and 10
Page 2...Numbers 9, 8 and 7
Page 3....Numbers 6, 5, and 4
Page 4.... Numbers 3, 2, and 1
12. Nintendo Power, November 1993
If you're a gamer in your mid-to-late twenties, then chances are you have your own favorite issue of Nintendo Power -- the one that was first to arrive when you subscribed. Back when Nintendo's own mag was the default media outlet for all there is to know about video games, earning your own issues was something of a rite of passage, a sign that you've become a true Power Player and should start wearing sunglasses and fingerless gloves at your earliest opportunity.
Nintendo was apt to experiment with its covers, using clay models for Issue 1 and a handful of other issues. From the early era of NP, though, this one is my favorite -- yes, it looks nothing like the character from Secret of Mana it's supposed to represent, but it's still an endearing, uncluttered piece of art.
11. Joystik, January 1983
Largely unknown these days outside of collector circles, Joystik was a primarily strategy guide-oriented magazine published intermittently through the early 1980s. The title sticks out from the gaggle of classic-era mags for two reasons: its crystal-clear screenshots (back when snapping screenshots was more of an art than a science), and its utterly trippy art.
Each issue of Joystik was packed with art similar to what you see here -- everything has an odd sort of airbrushed luminous effect applied to it, creating the effect of looking straight out of a video game. It's extremely '80s, but also extremely cool, and it's little wonder why issues of Joystik regularly go for at least $20 when they appear on auctions.
10. Play, March 2006
Play is one of the most beautiful game magazines in the US, especially when you compare it to GameFan and Gamers' Republic -- editor-in-chief Dave Halverson's previous efforts. It's a title that obviously pays close attention to design and layout on every page, and if you'll forgive Halverson's unabashed adoration of the platform-game genre, you'll find a huge amount of lovely things to look at each issue.
I chose this cover from Play because it best symbolizes the magazine's style when it comes to covers. Very few headlines mar the subject art here; it's allowed to show off everything it's got, and with a game like Okami where art is everything, that's key. Even when Play puts a boring game up front, the art remains beautiful -- a recent issue featuring MotoGP comes to mind.
