Magazine Covers
Newsstand art
Gaming magazine covers featured bold artwork that competed for attention on newsagents' shelves and now serve as nostalgic time capsules.
Before the internet, magazine covers sold issues. Gaming publications competed with striking artwork—Oliver Frey’s painted covers for Crash, Zzap!64’s bold designs, Nintendo Power’s character art. These covers served as marketing, editorial statement, and sometimes the only visual representation of games buyers would see before purchase. They were sold as collectibles at the time, and remain so.
Covers were collectibles at the time
Not only in retrospect. In November 1986 CRASH sold its own covers back to its readers as wall posters:
OLIVER FREY POSTERS FOR YOUR WALL! A superb series of famous covers by Oliver Frey can be yours in poster form.
Four were offered — Kepler of Mars, Metro Force 1, Red Moon and Zombies of the Night — at £2.50 each or £7.50 for the set, cheques to Newsfield, at roughly 80 × 57cm, which the advertisement measures as “about eight magazine pages”. A magazine cover was a piece of artwork the publisher could sell twice.
Frey worked both sides of the shelf
The convenient split — Frey on magazine covers, Bob Wakelin on game packaging — does not hold. Frey painted inlay artwork too. Per-game credit panels in Commodore 64: a visual Commpendium name him for Beyond the Forbidden Forest (COSMI / U.S. Gold, 1985), Beach-Head II: The Dictator Strikes Back (Access / U.S. Gold, 1985) and Green Beret (Imagine, 1986).
The same artist was therefore competing with himself on a newsagent’s shelf: his cover on the magazine, his painting on the box beside it.
Fast facts
- Purpose: attract buyers on newsagent shelves.
- Artists: Oliver Frey (Newsfield), Bob Wakelin (Ocean), many others.
- Style evolution: painted → photographic → digital.
- Status: collectibles then as well as now — CRASH sold Frey covers as posters in 1986.
Notable artists
Cover art creators:
- Oliver Frey: Crash and Zzap!64 covers — and game inlay artwork for U.S. Gold and Imagine.
- Bob Wakelin: Ocean Software game packaging.
- Various magazine staff: in-house art departments.
Cover conventions
What made gaming covers distinctive:
- Character focus: mascots and protagonists.
- Action scenes: gameplay moments dramatised.
- Review scores: prominently displayed ratings.
- Exclusive content: cover-mounted tapes and discs.