It’s hard to imagine now, but print catalogues were an important part of marketing in the early 2000’s. A standard promotional technique was to print and direct-mail hundreds or even thousands of print catalogues – and Goodman Games did just that. Many times, in fact.

This update will feature a lot of graphics, because we’re going to show you five years of Goodman Games print catalogues!

In 2004, 2005 and 2006 we printed lengthy full-color catalogues that were distributed via mail order and conventions. At this time we also printed posters and postcards. Social media didn’t exist yet, and print media was still very much a thing.

In 2007 we printed a booklet called “Adventures in Retail” designed to help retailers sell our products. It was distributed at the GAMA Trade Show that year, and contains so many promotional tidbits that are specific to that pre-internet era.

These catalogues show the expanding Goodman Games product line, and the importance of backstock in this era. 2004 was 8 pages; 2005 was 12 pages; 2006 was 16 pages.

The last catalogue we produced was in 2009, at the dawn of the 4E era. Because all of our d20 backstock was rendered unsalable by the announcement of 4E, the 2009 catalogue is a mere 4 pages long, compared to 16 pages in 2007. 4E would go on to fail as a game system, and digital media was growing in importance. Those two factors combined to make that 2009 catalogue the last print catalogue we would ever publish. 

In these catalogues you can see announcements of several products that never came to be, for one reason or another: Zoopolis, The Dungeoneer RPG, Spellburn: Frontier Fantasy, and the DCL. The DCL was the Dungeon Crawl League, an organized play concept that fizzled when 4E itself fizzled.

Here are the pages from those historical catalogues!

Wow. How things have changed!