Breaking Down Game Informer’s 350+ Covers By The Numbers

We are currently celebrating our 300th issue, but thanks to myriad alternate covers, we have actually printed just over 350 different images on the front of our magazine. Here are just some of the patterns and oddities we’ve noticed looking back on our own history.

Breakdown By Publisher
First, all the publishers who have only had one cover. Publishers Accolade, Black Isle, Blizzard, BMG Interactive, CD Projekt Red, D3 Publisher, Electro Brain, Epic Games, Fullbright, Hello Games, Kaneko, Malibu Interactive, Ninja Theory, Psygnosis, Tecmo, Vivendi, and Working Designs have each had one Game Informer cover. There is also the odd case of Rise of the Tomb Raider, which was co-published by Microsoft and Square Enix.

989 Studios, Atari, GT Interactive, Hudson Soft, Infogrames, Interplay, MTV Games,  and Valve are each able to claim two Game Informer covers. Deep Silver and Disney Interactive have each had three covers.

And finally 22 covers have been custom Game Informer jobs that cannot be assigned to a specific publisher. For the the publishers that have been featured the most, check out the list below.

Breakdown By Developer
The developer list is far more diverse, but here are the developers who had had the most covers. It’s worth noting that developers like EA, Ubisoft, and Rockstar on this list serve as an umbrella identifier for multiple internal studios.

Breakdown By Genre

Here are a handful of other interesting statistics about our library of covers.

Eleven issues featured only vehicles or ships on the cover

Two of our covers featured hardware only – the Dreamcast issue and a PlayStation 2 issues.

Our 100th issue is the only cover that has no images and features only text.

Four (technically five, if you count Rainbow Six’s alternate cover) of our covers feature games that were later cancelled: Starcraft Ghost, Fear & Respect, Tiberium: Command & Conquer, and Rainbow Six: Patriots.

We made two fake covers that appeared as props in films. We made a Shadow of the Colossus cover for the movie Reign Over Me, the 2007 movie starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle. You can read more about that cover here. and a cover for the fake game Stay Alive for 2006 movie of the same name.

• For more on our 300th issue, head here.
• To hear and watch us chat about Game Informer‘s 300-issue-long history, head here.
• For a statistical breakdown of our own top 300 list head here.
• To read about the snubs that didn’t make our list, head here.
• For each of the staff’s personal top 10 games lists, head here.
• To read your reader-created top 300 list, head here.