HARD DRIVES

How Paintball Started?

While the history of many different sports is usually unclear, the history of paintball can be absolutely clearly traced to the first actual paintball game and its inventors. Surprisingly such a military-type game drew its first main inspiration from hunt and not from war. Everything began in 1976 and the names of the inventors are Hayes Noel, Bob Gurnsey, and Charles Gaines. The idea came to them when they were discussing Gaines’ recent trip to Africa and his experiences in hunting buffalo. They were all into hunting, but usually a hunt required time for preparations, travel and the process itself, so they came to an idea that they could stalk and hunt each other. It was a raw idea and even after discussing the rules the main question remained: what will replace the rifles? A solution was found a year and a half later, when their mutual friend George Butler showed them a paintball gun in an agricultural catalog. This was the famous Nelspot 007, a device for marking cattle and trees, manufactured by Nelson Paint Company.

The first painball game in history occurred on June 2, 1981. For the first time twelve players competed against each other with Nelspot 007s pistols in a capture the flag game on an 80 acre wooded cross-country ski area. As you see the preparations for the first paintball game took five years, but today every fan of paintball would say that these five years were worth it. These first twelve included the three inventors, a number of their friends and people interested in this new game. They were mostly hunters, so the dynamics and the gaming process of original paintball were different from modern speedball for example. A writer from Sports Illustrated also participated in the game and in June 1981 he wrote and article about the game, which was initially called Survival. One of the main problems of Survival were the early paintball guns themselves, their CO2 cartridge held about 10 rounds, also the gun had to be recocked after each shot. So basically the whole game was more like a hunt with rare shots and limited number of rounds, and could last for hours. It is even hard to imagine how the first players could play a capture-the-flag game with a single-shot loaded markers. Another problem was the gear and especially the masks, which were not created at the time. The players used shop glasses, leaving most of the face exposed. Also the first paintballs were oil-based and thus not water soluble. Nevertheless the interest for the game began to rise, so Bob Gurnsey formed the National Survival Game Company and entered a contract with Nelson Paint Company to be the sole distributor of their paintball equipment. But the real popularity came to paintball only few years later when rival manufacturers joined the growing paintball gear business. Naturally the technologies began developing faster, resulting in more combat effective markers, which led to changes in the dynamics of the game, turning the game from hunting to adrenaline filled sport.

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