Our April Fool's Day tradition around here is Game Infarcer – a parody magazine featuring fake games, pretend news, and even a non-existent editor-in-chief. This year's edition went online today, including a wonderful illustration of Resident Evil IX by artist Zander Cannon. But if you've been reading Game Informer for a while, you know that this isn't the first time Zander has created the cover for Game Infarcer. In fact, this is the 16th consecutive year we've collaborated with him on this project.
To celebrate such a long history, I got together with Zander, my colleague Ben Reeves, and former GI editor Jeff Cork to take a stroll down memory lane. The four of us worked together on the majority of these covers, so we traded stories about all 16 of them. In this retrospective, we share our recollections on all things Game Infarcer, from the origin of the core cover concepts to the technical details of creating the illustrations.