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paintballimpact.com / History of the Game / Origins
The Origins of Paintball
While sports like archery or soccer go back hundreds and even thousands of years, the origins of paintball date back only a few decades. But what a few decades they were. Paintball started out among a few friends playing survival games, and grew to the sport today where almost 10 million a year play. For a brief timeline of how the game of paintball evolved, read on below.
The man most responsible for the birth of the game was Hayes Noel, of New York City. Hayes Noel, when not making heart pounding deals at the New York Stock Exchange, dreamed up the idea of a survival game, where friends and competitors could play a game that was not only fun, but would teach them about fundamental survival skills. Hayes dreamed up a game that would teach players about how to survive and take care of themselves should the need ever arise. The fun of shooting at each other in non-lethal competition may have had something to do with it too.
Many of the fundamentals of the game began to come together during a fishing outing between Charles Gaines and Hayes Noel. There, they came up with the basic elements of a survival game, a game of total elimination until one man is left standing. The next step in defining the game was finding the right equipment. Finding the right equipment means finding a firing mechanism that would obviously tag someone as eliminated, but not cause injury to the individual.
George Butler, a friend of Hayes Noel, then discovered an agricultural catalog featuring a paint marker for marking animals like cattle. This paint marker was called the Nelspot Marker and sold buy Nelsom paint in Michigan. The Paintballs were oil based and used to mark cows that were up for vaccination. The Nelson paintballs were also used for marking trees slated for cutting.
The Nelspot Marker was a pistol shaped but with a long clear barrel in the shape of a tube projecting out of the back end. The back end was loaded with paintballs for firing. The Nelspot Marker was powered with CO2 cartridges. The oil based paintball shot out of the marker was mean to burst open when it hit its target.
Hayes and butler ordered these pump markers and proceeded onto the field research where they would shoot each other with reckless abandon. They played in the woods, hiding behind trees and behind the rocks, shooting at each other until they were good and sore. While shooting each other in the ass and other body parts proved to be loads of fun, Gainer, Butler, and Hayes decided it would be even more fun to get other into the game. From there, they decided to organize refereed games. The guys mapped out a field, crafted their own rules, and got friends and family from all over the country in on the action.
The first organized game was held on Saturday June 27th 1981, near Henniker, New Hampshire. The game took place on a huge 80 acre woodlot, where flags were placed at its midpoints of the sides of the field. Each side of the field was represented by a different flag color. The goal of this early version of capture the flag was to capture one of each color flag without getting hit.
Some other early pioneers of the game of paintball include Lionel Atwill (writer of the first official book on paintball, Bob Carlson, Joe Drinon, Ken Barret, and Ritchie White.
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