But why is it called Pathfinder?
You will find a lot of information on the first year of the Pathfinder brand in Paizo Publishing's 10th Anniversary Retrospective—Year 5 (2007) The Year Everything Changed.
But, specifically:
Naming Pathfinder
With the name Pathfinder so prevalent in everything we make nowadays, it's almost hard to believe that six years ago, we were struggling with what we were going to call our new line. If you've ever been involved in a brainstorm for naming something, you'll know that it's an agonizing process. We gathered the Paizo creative staff into the conference room and started to brainstorm words that we associate with adventures. Here we see the notes Wes Schneider took from our brainstorm. Once we had a list of words, we started combining some of them to make potential names, so if we had the words crypt, morning, crawl, star, and sword, we'd try names like like Starsword, Morningstar, Cryptcrawl... After three long meetings, nobody was entirely happy with what we'd come up with. The leading candidate for quite a while was actually "Kobold," because we like the little buggers, and because we thought it would be a neat homage to Dragon Magazine (it turns out that Wolfgang Baur had a similar thought process when he named his new magazine). Pathfinder was one of the names that made the finalist list, but it took us a while (and a successful trademark search) to convince us that we'd found the path we were seeking.
Thanks man, that was bugging me for a while.
