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paintballimpact.com / History of the Game / History X
Paintball History X
Paintball has come a long way from its humble beginnings on the 80 acre wood lot to the national games featured on ESPN. Paintball has even been featured on ESPN on the Miami NPPL World Championships. How did the game make it this far in such a short period of time, and what is the future of the sport. Will the game ever get the type of national audience that baseball and football enjoy. Will paintball games ever be broadcast on ESPN or another network on a regular basis? To understand the future of the game, we must consider its past, and then go on to consider what obstacles lay ahead.
The sport of paintball began inside the mind of Hayes Noel who was no former high school football running back or grizzled woodsman, but a New York City stockbroker, of all things. He saw a world of people so far removed from the hunters and gatherers that we once were, and in general a society lacking the necessary survival instincts that we may some day need. He conceived of creating a sport where people could sharpen and recapture the necessary survival instincts that we may some day need, and in a game that was competitive, fun, and safe.
Hayes Noel and other pioneers of the game including Joe Drinon (Stockbroker), Bob Carlson (Trauma surgeon), and Carl Sandquist (contracting estimator), created a game of tag where players could eliminate each other by marking them with a non-lethal ammo. They searched fan and wide until they came across a paint ammo sold by Nelson. The first version of the game was a survival game. It was a winner take all game where everyone would shoot at each other until only one was left standing. The next version of the game was also focused on the individual. The first organized game played in 1981 featured multiple flags at all corners of the field where the winning player would capture each flag without getting hit by a paintball. The first winner of this multiple flag format was the forester Ritchie White, adding support to Noel's theory that city folk was a little soft on survival skills compared to their country brothers.
The markers in the early versions of paintball were pump action. The successful players in these games relied on making the limited number of paintballs that they had count. All of these early events captured the information of everyone involved, and paintball fields began going up pretty quickly after that. Early paintball fields were played in large fields and with slow shooting stock guns and pump guns.
The first major change in the game occurred when field owners began hosting major tournaments. The second major change began with the first speedball fields that we know of today. Field owners began covering parking lots and fields with Astroturf that football fields were throwing out and then laying inflatable bunkers on top of them. In turf & inflatable bunker fields, field owners could create games that were ideal for an audience to view as well as fields that they could custom design. Teams playing in tournaments on these fields could study the bunker formations before these matches, and could game plan around them.
The popularity of the Astroturf and bunker speedball led to professional leagues such as the NPPL, PSP, The APL Tournament Series, and the NXL. The future of paintball when it comes to professional sports will lie in the ability of the professional leagues to gain a large enough audience to interest national and cable TV contracts.
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