So, the list is not that long:
Blender - This will be your main tool and it's free... You will model, texture and animate in here unless, of course, you are used to some other software. If you want to make a simple game with low resolution textures you can just use Blender, it even has an exporter to make an .exe file.
Maya - You will use maya to bake texture maps... This is something that blender has a hard time doing, at least with good quality. Though it is not free, Maya is a really good tool and I advise you to get more acquainted with it. At least when it comes to rigging and animation it is really a powerful tool. But, if you don't have any problems with it, it's common knowledge that there are cracks for software. I do not take responsability for actions you might take...
Photoshop/Gimp - Both of them can do the job... But Gimp is open source and therefor free, and has some tools that are only available in Phothoshop as plug-ins, like "make tile" that lets you repeat a texture countless times or "make normal" where the grey values of the picture are measured in order to make a normal map that will tell your game engine the small bumps of your object to create more detail without wasting too much memory.
Unity 3D - This is a game engine. It is free for non-commercial use, but it requires knowledge on programming language like C#, C++ or Java... Besides that is a really good engine that runs smoothly and you can get really good quality visual effects and it's easy to use.
I will post some tutorials on Blender, Photoshop and Unity... It might take some time but I'll try to post as many as I can as soon as I can.
