Bookazines (Games Industry)

Edit on Github | Updated: 1st April 2024

What do you call a product that collects articles from monthly magazines into a single yearly publication? The publishers came up with the term “Bookazine” to cover this concept of a very large magazine related to a specific topic.

Many of these were published with topics related to the Games Industry such as 3D Modelling, Animation, Photoshop, Programming or even just Games themselves.

Programming Bookazines

Gaming Bookazines

Bookazines dedicated just to gaming also exist and can contain some articles relavent to Game Development and the history of the industry as a whole.

Retro Micro Games Action

The UK Magazine GamesTM had a section dedicated to retro games every month, while it was only a small part of the magazine it had a wealth of interesting information, especially interesting for the topic of this site is the interviews with developers. While its sister magazine Retro Gamer focussed on much earlier retro gaming, the Retro section of GamesTM would go all the way up to PS2 and even PS3!

There were 10 volumes published from 2011 until 2021.

Behind The Scenes

Interviews

Tom Kalinske Interview

One of the most interesting interviews is with former SEGA of America CEO Tom Kalinske who was in charge when EA reverse-engineered the Sega Mega Drive. He was furious and famously said:

“Trip [Hawkins], didn’t your mother ever teach you the difference between right and wrong?”

This may have got the meeting off to a rough start but in the end SEGA got John Madden football and EA got favoured licensing rights.

Pickford Brothers Interview

The interview with the Pickford Brothers was also facinating and mentioned that they were one of the first studios to get NES development kits outside of Japan and one of the first Game Boy developers outside of Japan. I wonder which development kits they were given for NES and Game Boy… it would have been great to ask them more details about the development kits.

They also managed to play around with one of the first SNES development kits in Europe when they worked at Software Creations. It would have been great to ask them what they remember about these development kits!

Digital Art Bookazines

Get Started in 3D (2014-2021)

First published in 2014 by Future this Bookazine has been republished at least 4 times with almost identical content. It contains 180 pages of pure content with no Advertisements, honestly if you can find a copy in your local newsagents then I would reccomend picking it up as it is well worth the money.

Contents of Get Started in 3D

The Bookazine is split into the following sections:

• Showcase - Shows off 10 fantastic pieces of 3D Art
• Fundamentals - 19 Articles by Mike Griggs
• Theory - 5 Articles on theory by Denis Kozlov
• Tutorials - 14 articles written for specific software

Showcase

The table below shows the pieces features in the Bookazine along with their artists and the software used to create them.

Fundamentals

The Fundamentals section is a series of 19 articles all written by Mike Griggs and previously featured in the monthly 3D World Magazine, the table below lists the articles along with the original magazine they were featured in (if known).

Theory

The Theory section contains an in-depth look at the theoretical concepts that make 3D graphics work, all written by Denis Kozlov.

Tutorials

The Tutorials section contains 14 articles written for specific software such as 3ds Max, Photoshop and ZBrush. The later editions have replaced some of the older tutorials with newer tutorials from the 3DWorld magazine, the table below contains both the older and newer content found in the first three editions.

Q&A

The Questions and Answers section contains 6 of the most popular Q&A sections from the monthly magazine.