Why the heck does Goodman Games have a dinosaur for a logo? And why was there a real, sculpted dinosaur head at our first convention booth? Yes, THIS head:

Well, our first product was a genre mash-up RPG about dinosaurs in space during the Civil War. Yes, you read that right. Miniature painter and sculptor Derek Schubert drew the footer that adorned every page of Dinosaur Planet: Broncosaurus Rex. A footer that, ironically, started yet another Goodman Games visual trademark - the illuminated page. It was this art in particular:

The triceratops on the right-hand side became our first logo. Our first book included amazing dinosaur art, such as these images:

As Stu Horvath tells it in Old-School From The Start, here is how that real dinosaur head came to be...

For conventions, Joe leaned into being the “dinosaur guy.” Plastic dinos decorated his modest table at conventions and held his business cards. At the GAMA trade show in Las Vegas, he went even further. When he was walking along Divisadero to Comix Experience, he kept passing a storefront with a sign that read “San Francisco Prosthetic-Orthotic.” But it wasn’t the sign that caught his attention.

The business was started by Walter Koniuk in 1954 and provided custom replacements for people who had lost limbs and other body parts. His son Wayne took over the business in 1980, which at that point relied heavily on silicone for its products. The silicone was essentially the same grade as the stuff used by Hollywood special effects artists to fabricate masks and other props for films, so Wayne tried his hand at using it to create lifelike busts of dinosaurs, dragons and animals. He put the best of them in the storefront window, mounted like hunting trophies.  

“I walked in and offered him a couple of hundred dollars if I could rent one of his dinosaur heads for the weekend,” Goodman recalls. “He agreed, then I drove to Vegas to the GAMA trade show. Everybody came by to take pictures with the dinosaur head.” Koniuk had explained that the head was an Arrhinoceratops, an ancestor of the Triceratops. At some point during the show, the head was dubbed Rhonda, Rhonda the Arrhinoceratops. She was so popular that Joe decided to replace his original logo (a cowboy with a lasso riding a triceratops, from the border art of Dinosaur Planet, by Derek Schubert) with a painting of Rhonda by Will McAusland. She graces the covers of Goodman Games publications to this day.

Apparently the scientific name is "Arrhinoceratops" (with an "A") though we've been saying Rhinoceratops for 25 years. Oops!

The original art for Will's Rhonda painting hangs on my office wall to this day:

A few more photos from that very first GAMA Trade Show, at the Orleans Hotel in Vegas, circa March 2002:

Tell us in the comments what YOU were doing in the gaming space way back in 2002!

Tomorrow: Dungeon Crawl Classics begins!