I’m not a gamer, I’m the Gamest.
I had boxes and boxes of video game magazines when I was little, which is probably why my mom made me throw them out when we moved houses at one point. The one cover that’s always stuck with me was this one issue of Official Playstation Magazine (OPM, US version). I’d been a regularly buyer so I could get the demo discs but there was some period where I had not gotten one in a long time, and then one day at the store I spied a new issue but something about it had changed. The magazine was now a different shape, larger and more square, and the visual sensibility was completely different and way more stylish. The cover feature was about, I believe, MGS3 Snake Eater and the cover art was just rows and rows of MGS-style red exclamation marks against a white background, lined up like you were looking up at airplanes doing a bombing run. It was very striking. I assume there was some change in ownership or editorial or something, but it was basically like a completely new magazine with the same name.
I can’t find any picture of it, and I can find very few OPM covers on the internet in general. I wonder how useful my boxes would have been; I was a regular buyer of Official Playstation Magazine (OPM), Playstation Magazine (PSM), Official Dreamcast Magazine (ODCM), and to a lesser extent Official Xbox Magazine (OXM).
Edit: Official Dreamcast Magazine probably went bust not because the Dreamcast died but because their choice of paper stock was way too high quality.
Hey, that’s it! Thanks for finding it! At the time I was so used to seeing game magazine covers just being CG renders of characters that anything more artistic than that was novel, but I don’t know if by that point everything had already moved to having more personality in cover design or if OPM was something trying something new.
what about how the changing face of gaming is heihachi animorphing into sonic by first shedding his hatred, then, only by fully jettisoning cynicism, transforming from that sassy blue avatar of blind progress into the true embodiment of motion as joy
yes?
also thinking about the fact that the playstation port of tekken 2 came out before mario 64 is kinda wild
just a lot to take in all at once true intelligence that must be reckoned with
i was going through the game informer covers because i thought i remembered some being kinda cool looking for their 200th issue but holy shit its just becasue i hate ALL THE VISUAL NOISE of their hyper detailed magic card concept art collages that
that seemed good
but its just pictures of the games on a white background its so bad! it just seemed WONDERFUL in comparison
i didnt hate these though
second shoulda been tileable tho
An Aussie gaming mag called Megazone got some pretty sick cover art from one Frantz Kantor in it’s late life:
Was happy to find most of the run archived: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A"MegaZone"&sort=titleSorter
Amazingly, Frantz is still active! – https://www.deviantart.com/frantzkantor // https://www.facebook.com/frantz.kantor
alfred you’ve done it again
these aren’t covers, but the uk magazine sega force (and its spinoffs, sega force mega and sega force master) would be illustrated with this gang of violent cyberpunk teens, all painted by prolific artist oli frey.
hard-core computist
computism has ruined every polity it has found purchase in
we need some trials, and a senator brave enough to instigate
At this point, it’s gotten bad enough that I think that Butler person may have a point with all their calls for holy war.