OK, so one of the coolest things about the game industry around Xmas time is the specially designed holiday cards, and it turns out that, between us in the CMP Game Group offices (since we run Game Developer, Gamasutra, and Game Developers Conference in our various departments), we get a lot of the particularly neat ones.

So we've taken it upon ourselves to scan in some of our personal favorites, and present them here for the entire Internet* (*or our friends who read GameSetWatch, anyhow) to see. Many thanks to Brandon Sheffield @ Game Developer and especially Jamil Moledina at Game Developers Conference for lending us their cards for the scanning process.

Cards are in alphabetical order, so we're not 'playing favorites' - here goes:

DoubleFine's card has a) totally cute artwork, and b) an extremely funny Tim Schafer-authored poem inside about how they can't talk about their next game. 'All the elves signed NDAs', indeed!

Eidos and its Crystal Dynamics office went for a fake game box, complete with exciting blockbuster info on the Xmas season, and group pictures of their offices.

Just a quick shout out for Koei, who unfortunately didn't put Gundam Musou on their Xmas card, but nonetheless showed off a wintry Dynasty Warriors character.

Namco Bandai's card is adorable because it has Pac-Man in a Santa outfit - nuff said, really. The bottom half of the card actually folds out to give you a closer look at the Tamagotchi village (Bandai's contribution) in the background.

   

One of two Nintendo holiday cards, with a simple keyhole type design featuring Wii players laughing it up.

The other Nintendo card has an inevitable 'Wii = We' pun on it. It's very wide, too!

The NIS Xmas card, for all you import fans - apparently the characters are from 'Soul Cradle (working title)'.

Red Octane's card weaves guitars (from its Guitar Hero franchise) and the company icon into a snowflake-style tableau.

Oddly enough, Sony's Xmas card also plays with geometric designs and Sony logos in a rather fetching fashion.

This origami paper came with one of Sony's Xmas mailing, so we thought we'd include it as a bonus.

   

Finally, Square Enix's card draws comparisons between December and, aha, Final Fantasy XII, for a very pure, wintry end to our round-up. This is just a selection of the cards out there, and we're going to try to add a few others from our various remote editors _and_ link to other people who are going to scan in their own cards.

[UPDATE - we added the Sony Xmas origami design in wallpaper-able sizes, at least!]