Beep! Mega Drive magazine

When it comes to Japanese video game magazines, Famitsu is the title that everyone knows. First launched in 1986 to cover the Nintendo Famicom, it’s the elder statesman of games journalism, and is still going strong to this day… 

Which is great. Congratulations all round. But there’s not much I can add to that conversation.

Instead, we’re going to turn our attention to something a little more niche…

Beep! Mega Drive. 

For a brief period in the early 90s, it was home to some of the best magazine cover art you’re likely to come across. A technicolour fever dream of jazz-era influences and abstraction. 

Art and commerce

Generally speaking, magazine covers go one of two ways. The most common approach is to get a promo image from a PR agency and slap that on the cover. Back in the day this meant lots of Sonic, Mario, Street Fighter 2, etc,

The alternative is to commission a specific art piece for the cover. Zzap!64 and Super Play are fondly remembered for their iconic covers courtesy of Oli Frey and Will Overton (respectively). And Edge magazine had an amazing run of bespoke magazine cover art in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Thing is, whichever option the editor / publisher went with, the cover art was always tied back to a specific game, article or theme covered in the magazine. The early Beep! Mega Drive covers don’t seem to worry about any of that. And I appreciate the commercial recklessness of that approach…

These days, video game magazines don’t really exist. Not in the traditional, monthly publication kinda way. So no one has to worry much about magazine covers. Which means they don’t have to consider the commercial and creative tension inherent in the format.

And that’s what makes these Beep! Mega Drive covers so interesting. The obvious commercial temptation to slug a popular game on the cover has been resisted. Instead, the publishers have gone with creative abstraction. 

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any specific info about the artists behind the covers featured on this page. Someone did reach out on Twitter (X) linking the images to an artist named Hideo Igawa (伊川英雄), who is listed in the magazine’s credits. But I can’t verify that.

Also, I should note that around 1993 the magazine jettisoned these amazing covers in favour of a more traditional approach - whereby every-single-cover featured an image of Sonic the Hedgehog.

But that’s another story. Let’s just appreciate the artwork. Keep scrolling for the full gallery…

This article originally appeared in Forgotten Worlds issue 6. A limited number of copies are still available to purchase.