Goodman Games 25th Anniversary Celebration Project Update: Dragon Magazine Ads & The Pigeon

Goodman Games

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8 days ago

Project Update: Dragon Magazine Ads & The Pigeon

Let's start this update with some amazing art by Brad McDevitt, circa 2002:

We'll come back to that image in a minute. For now, fix your mind to 2002. Back in 2002, marketing RPGs was different than it is today. There was no Kickstarter, no Amazon, no DriveThruRPG, no online storefront. Mail order was conducted via checks sent by US Postal mail. There were far fewer cons than today - and probably a lot more game stores to reach.

If you wanted to advertise your new RPG, you couldn't run Facebook ads - because there was no Facebook. You couldn't run Google ads - because there was no Google. If you really wanted to advertise your new RPG, you went to the mothership of all RPG marketing: Dragon magazine. It was the only place to be if you really wanted to reach a couple thousand gamers with any kind of message.

We had new d20 releases in a very crowded field. So what did we do? We went to Dragon. But maybe not how the other kids would have done it.

As Stu tells it:

To promote the Aerial Adventure Guides, Joe took an ad out in Dragon Magazine. The idea was to gently taunt players with the line “This pigeon gets better mileage than your character.” But to make the ad work, he needed a photo of the best-looking pigeon possible. San Francisco street pigeons weren’t cutting it, so he had to look elsewhere. He eventually found the Nation Pigeon Association, which “promotes the pigeon hobby through fellowship, education, and competition” since its founding in 1920.

For a $10 donation, they gave him the picture that ran in the ad. “I think this is the world record pigeon for that year or something. It's a good-looking pigeon!”

And yeah, it was maybe a really weird ad. But I'm pretty sure readers noticed it:

Believe it or not, I found the receipt in my old files!

I even found the invoice for the ad payment.

$1,350 for an ad was an enormous sum in those days. For comparison, that was about the same cost as the entire print run of DCC #1.

Did it work? No idea. There were no ref-codes or other ways to track results back then!

This was our second Dragon ad, promoting Complete Guide to Doppelgangers in a similarly weird vein:

Now back to Brad's art. Around this same time, Brad was illustrating The Complete Guide to Drow. His interiors were so good. They're still some of my all-time favorite Goodman Games illustrations. Here are a few more from that publication:

Does anyone remember those Dragon ads? Does anybody have a copy of issues #300 or #301 lying around to check? And what do you guys think of those awesome drow illustrations?

P.S. Thanks to the fans who have been finding old photos of our con booths and sending them in!!

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