Paintball History Question

[PBGunny]

Gotta remember that during the late 80's/early 90's there was all sort of stuff going on like Ruby Ridge, Waco, OK City bombing, Michigan militia. Then there was the Hollywood slant with movies like Rambo 1 2 & 3. Paintball at that time was different, stealth was the name of the game and camo gave you an edge that was the difference between playing longer or the big walk back to the staging area. We certainly got some looks walking into a gas station on a Sunday morning to stock up on goodies for a day of paintballing all camo-ed up.
I remember an incident that happened to a couple of teammates on their way up to Monster Game. Apparently one of them was showing off some wooden grips that he had made for his Tippmann Carbine just as an off duty cop drove by them. Wearing camo and toting a "machine gun" was enough to cause this cop to radio it in. A few miles up the highway, the police had shut off I-94 and pulled them over at gunpoint. After getting frisked and their car turned upside down with everything laid out along the road, they were allowed to go on their way. They learned a very valuable lesson that day.

[iamthelazerviking]

I wish I was old enough to have experienced the "Rambo" days of early paintball

[Hp_lovecraft]

When I started playing in the 80s, it certainly had a negative image to some. We all called it wargames and mail-sum scenarios in the woods were the standard type of play.

the local field was specifically setup to mimick the owner’s experience in Vietnam. Tournaments were in the woods.

advertising was near impossible since because of its reputation. Many fields did not even allow minors to play.

and I loved every minute of it. It seemed risky and dangerous. Very fringe. Like some you would see in SOF mags.

but that all changed in the 90s. There was a hard push to make paintball more accessible, more like a sport, out of the woods and more marketable and make more money

ie speedball.

and I hate everything about speeeball but it did make paintball mainstream to such a point that new players did not consider woodsball to be “real” paintball.

and I’m fine with that. It softened the image for paintball to the point where most players are probably kids. You have paintball birthday parties, etc

so for the OP, 80s certainly. 90s much less, though you would occasionally see a news media story about terrorists “training” but it was just people playing woodsball.

[Grendel]

I started playing in '88 and at my first field I was one of the younger guys [kids] and I was a First Class Petty Officer ET1/SS Submariner and a qualified Reactor Operator/Engineering Watch Supervisor. I was 23 years old and still was called "kid" at the paintball field. Paintball was way more expensive then it is now to just play the game. Most of our cost now is "keeping up with the Joneses" and shooting more paint in a rec day then we would shoot in tournament play over a full weekend. Paint was expensive $10 for 100 paintballs in a bag was normal.

[Jordan]

Grendel, I still pay that much for paint at some fields. The buying power your dollar has is frustrating.

[Drunkscriblerian]

That makes sense. And, I remember seeing one of those "hit piece" news shows about paintball when I was a kid, this would have been around 1990 or so. Looking back, it was clear the producers were trying to make paintball look bad, dangerous and 'skaaaiiireee'....but to me, it looked fun and exciting as hell. So, when a few years later I got an invite to a paintball game I was like "hell yes I'm doing this!" The irony is I probably wouldn't have gone if I hadn't seen that hit piece.

[DocsMachine]

Wasn’t there something about the wolfs den early on that bought the media attention. I remember seeing an old video with Jerry Brawn maybe makes the case for paintball on a talk show. They were trying to change the PR of paintball from a bad boy extreme perspective to more of a survival game. Isn’t that why Jerry changed the name to Survival NY.

-Remember, SC Village in California was originally called Sat Cong Village.

For those that might not have seen it, I have an article I scanned and posted out of a 1987 issue of American Handgunner magazine. All camo, an "Airborne" T-shirt (with blood red paint) and ghillie suits.

There's also a YT copy of an old Morton Downey, Jr. TV show (if anyone remembers him) that covered paintball. I watched it years ago, kind of recall it being kinda negative, typical ambush-interview type of stuff.

Doc.

[Hp_lovecraft]

Morton Downey Jr came to our town once... calling us the "Satanic headquarters of the USA" for an episode he was doing. But we were like, it is? EDIT: It was Geraldo in 1987. lol. they both had wild talk shows in the 80s.

[martix_agent]

Everything some people don't understand or like is always a "satanic branch of whatever" Taylor Swift is being called that now. D&D was called that, rock music was called that.... the list goes on and on.

[Drunkscriblerian]

This has been a fascinating discussion everyone, thanks for participating.

So, to move it forward a tad; was anyone else actively in paintball for the "transition to ExTrEmE sPoRt" bullshit that happened around 1999-2000? Because I was, and as a recreational player at the time...man, paintball pivoted towards the suck then.

I've noticed something; during historical treatises on paintball, after about 1990 every single recap of the history always shifts gears and starts talking about the emerging tournament scene and what it was up to. There's no mention of what recreational paintball was up to, was like, etc. It's all about which team won what tournament in what year, and how finanically big paintball was becoming. It seems like rec-ball got shifted into a feeder for tournament ball...like the sport was assuming that every rec player had dreams of competing professionally.

My take (based on my experience): I remember speedballers showing up at the field I played on around 1998. They had tricked-out Mags and Cockers, were generally jock-ish in attitude and had kits totally unsuited for the woods. Thanks to their rattling pod packs, noisy electric hoppers and brightly colored jerseys, despite their superior firepower they were meat - easily picked off by even a farm boy with a rental Trracer if said farm boy knew his way around the woods, and most did. I remember getting a lot of laughs drilling speedballers with thousand-dollar rigs in the ass with my old PGP. For a time it felt like "Oh, the city boy wants to play in the woods? Let's show him how we do things here."

But the reality was, if those guys caught you out in open ground you were fucked...they could lock you behind a barricade by throwing a stream of paint at you and flank you easy. I remember that happening and having vague thoughts of "this is not good". Especially because I knew I could never afford the kind of firepower those guys were packing.

And then the field I played on shifted from straight woodsball to "speedball in the woods". You know, otherwise known as "modern rec-ball". There was cover, but no concealment...and thanks to the game format no time to sneak around even if there was cover to hide in. When paired with the introduction of even faster shooting guns, all of a sudden

A: Every skill I'd learned as a woodsballer became obsolete

B: The guys with the firepower could basically rule everything

C: If you didn't have $1200+ to blow on your rig, you were cannon fodder

Result: I, along with every single person I ever played with quit paintball due to a lack of options. Also, remember how I said that speedballers were "jock'ish in attitude"? Yeah, that only got worse as time went on. By 2001, I'd hung up my mask because paintball had become something I didn't want to participate in. Not only because I couldn't compete with the firepower, but because the people in it were just not who I wanted to hang with.

Everybody under the age of 30 says the mid-2000s was the Golden Age of Paintball...but between my experiences and what I've heard from people who tried to participate in the recreational side during this time, I'd call it our darkest hour culturally. It was a rude, nasty shit-show full of dude-bros with itchy trigger fingers and greedy corporations eager to cater to them. Honestly I'm glad the "ExTrEmE SpOrT" bullshit fell apart. It deserved to.

Anyone else have a different experience?

[Socalpumpballer]

The speedball side of it also got more of those player off the Rec fields and onto speedball. I would argue those were still the golden years because fields would have hundreds of players everyday, paint was the best, and there was more opportunity to play different styles. The worst years for paintball was after the tournament scene died around 2010 and caused what we see today which is 20+ years of tourney players playing almost exclusively rec ball. At least beginners had a target rich environment back in the day. Now they are getting completely wrecked by old farts with pump guns

[DocsMachine]

I saw more or less the same thing- heck, I opened my airsmithery in 1998 - but you have to keep in mind that no one was forcing the fancy guns and "accuracy by volume" mindset. The players wanted that stuff- they wanted to leave the pumps behind as fast as they could, because everybody thought if their gun could just shoot a little faster, they'd get more eliminations.

And the manufacturers were more than happy to go along with that.

Yes, there was always a contingent of pump and stock players, but to be honest, it wasn't all that popular until the '08-'09 recession. After that, people were dumping high-end semiautos for ten cents on the dollar because they couldn't afford to play, and needed the money. The remaining players were strapped for cash too, and a game day where you only needed a $150 pump and $50 in paint started being really appealing.

The tourney promoters saw this and brought out some mech-only events, just to get boots on the ground. Nobody could afford a tourney where your team had to go through twenty cases in a day, but they could afford two cases. That led to a resurgence in pump and mech, and spelled the end of the so-called ROF wars.

As for a "golden age"... it's different for all of us. There were articles in APG saying that "constant air", that is, anything but 12-grams, was going to "ruin the sport". Heck, the NPPL, the most influential tourney body at the time, first banned the use of bulk CO2 for a couple of years after it's advent, and later, also banned HPA for a time, 'til the players demanded it.

The inaugural issue of APG- in 1987- wondered if "high tech guns" were going to damage the sport- and by their definition of the time, "high tech" included autotriggers, 7 and 10-ounce bulk CO2 tanks, barrel extensions, and bulk hoppers (as opposed to stick feeds.)

Any given person's 'golden age' is when they, personally, had the most fun at it. For some people that was back in the 90s, for others it was in the early 2000s, for still others, it was last fall.

Doc.

[Grendel]

Yup, a lot of this does depend on your circumstances and when you started playing. I play stock class but in the late 80s early 90s when Constant Air (bulk CO2) became readily available I quickly abandoned CO2 cartridges. There was a lot of doomsayers around this transition as well as the transitions to hopper and "Guppies" at the time as well. The arms race was off and running....etc. But was it or was it already there. Friends who started paintball earlier then I were already modifying their stock markers to stick feed and making homemade hoppers. Quick release knobs for quicker CO2 cartridge changes then that dastardly inventor Tom Kaye released the Micro-CO2 stocks and the instrument of the Devil the AGD 6-Pak. There has always been an arms race in paintball and always will and what comes along with that was the nay-sayers and the every improvement is necessary crowd. I have been in the sport for a lot of the changes except the real early ones. Innovation is great and there is enough room in the sport for all of them IMHO but the problem is where you get mixes of the innovations inflicted on a crowd unsuspecting. The game (recreational) should be about playing the game and less about the gear but sadly there are Dicks and A$$holes in every community.

[Tarsun2]

i remember before EYES existed and before RAMPing was a thing. lol
not sure when it all changed but i remember seeing markers at walmart with ramp and eyes.

i didnt have $ so my clique was kingman/tippmann
then there were the mag/cocker guys.
And the fringe electro group... 1st time i saw an angel. i remember sitting out a game to eat lunch and everyone listening for the angel guy to shoot ropes.

[iamthelazerviking]

Random, this reminded me a of a funny small situation. On the topic of aggro douche types. My buddy who got me into paintball was wearing his JT sock hat at the theater and a dude comes up and says hey what kind of gun do you have? "A Minimal". Dude says "that's cool, I have an Autococker" then turns his head like "I'm so awesome" then walks off

[coyote]

There's an episode of whatever the Phil Donahue show was aired back in 1983 that covered paintball.

I couldn't find it on YouTube, and my Google Fu could only locate it behind a Patreon paywall.

If I remember correctly, and after 40 years that might be questionable, it devolved into a " what sort of person thinks shooting at each other is fun" rant.

Me I guess.

For better and worse our game evolved. It will continue to do so. Just watch NFL games from generations past. Gear, game theory, politics, the recreational market...they all change. Detractors will try to make us go away.

I need a day at the field, bad.

[Toestr]

I watched an interview with Charles Gaines (NSG cofounder) who described going on the Phil Donahue show, Good Morning America etc as a 'promotion'. Not sure if that meant sticking up for paintball in a hit piece or a genuine promotional interview. I can't see the likes of GMA being particularly confrontational.

[Axel]

Didn't Donahue have somebody from Wolf's Lair in a shouting match with a rabbi accusing them of being Nazis? Wild times, the 80s

[coyote]

That would fit the Donahue playbook.

I honestly only remember a demonstration where someone shot a hole in a bedsheet or something.

Donahue's response "this scares the hell out of me".

There was 5-10 minutes of content. That's all that remains in my fading memory.

[Slim]

In response to the OP's original question...

The majority of bad publicity and negative press paintball received was in the mid to late 1980s.

Paintball was NEVER called a "war game" where I was by the players, but it was called a "war game" by the press. Because paintball had originally started off as "The Survival Game", that title helped create the perception of "red neck survivalists" with the public. I remember the negative publicity being especially bad between 1986 and 1989. Idiots like Morton Downey Jr., Keith Ideama and George Funkhouser (the nazi-loving asshole who created Wolf's Lair) did more to harm the image of the game then any news media outlet ever did. Of course, the news media played a big role, but the juvenile actions of idiot players who shot up road signs, houses, and domestic animals helped drag the reputation of paintball down as well. You couldn't drive down any major highway here in CT without seeing permanent oil-based paintball splats on almost every other large road sign. I read quite a few negative editorials and news articles in the newspapers at the time and there was a legit concern that paintball would be legislated out of existence. Thanks to the hard work of many players, that never happened. But it was close.

By the 1990s, most of the novelty for the public had worn off and the news media had already moved on to new boogiemen. So, you missed out on the dark years, but being mindful of the game's overall reputation should never be taken for granted.

Regarding the transition period where paintball morphed into an extreme sport...

This transition started way before 1999. I started playing in 1985 and experienced the paintball "arms race" first hand. This "arms race" began the second a player put a pump on a Nel-Spot and added a 45° elbow to create a gravity-fed stick feed. From that moment on, the only considerations players cared about was having a higher rate of fire and a higher capacity. The introduction of tournament play compounded these considerations and VIOLA! The transition from a recreational game that was played for fun, to a hyper-competitive sport that is played to win was complete.

While I was just as guilty as all the other players for contributing to this "arms race", I was also acutely aware of the difference between recreational and tournament play. Recreational play was fun - the most fun I'd ever had in my life, while the structure and seriousness of tournament play was more like work. After watching player after player (some on my own team) cheat in order to "win at all costs" I became totally disenfranchised with tournament play and decided I would never engage at that level ever again. This was around 1989/1990. I've been playing and organizing recreational events ever since.

BTW, when Wolf's Lair first opened in 1988, they invited everyone to their opening day celebration event. At the time it looked amazing because they were promoting their venue almost like a Disneyland for paintball. They had bunkhouses even! No other field had that! At a team meeting, I floated the idea of participating in the opening day festivities and everyone was on board. I sent in the deposit and we were all excited to go. Then the news media got wind of the whole "nazi" aspect and it was a public relations nightmare. As soon as we saw how far they had gone with the nazi theme, not a single person on the team wanted anything to do with the place because fuck those nazi fucks! Fortunately, we were refunded our entire deposit. It's bullshit like this that will always give paintball a bad name.


I still have the Wolf's Lair "Passport" they sent us after receiving our deposit...

[Paintslinger16]

I think I gave all my first year Stuff to Carter way back when I was there a lot 88-92

[Grendel]

My favorite field ever original name was Combat USA but Dennis Day's wife Sandra thought it was better to move the name away from that concept of War/Combat. They renamed it Vanguard Paintball, damn I miss that field and those days.

[DocsMachine]

I can remember in the early days, that telling somebody that "I play paintball"... well, it didn't exactly earn a 'ew' sneer like I told them I shoveled out septic tanks for fun or something, but there were certainly a number of times where the response was closer to "oh, how special!" like I had to have my mittens clipped to my jacket.

And, I can definitely recall a few friends over the years, whose parents (we were that age ) wouldn't let them play a "violent war-game" like that.

These days, if somebody asks what I do, I tell them I "make custom paintball guns", and virtually never get anything other than an enthusiastic response. Occasionally somebody will give me the "oh, isn't that nice!" sort of response, presumably lumping me in with the stereotypical "internet entrepreneur selling dream catchers on Etsy" types (which honestly isn't that far off the mark. )

But yeah, overall, the sport has matured. It's no longer "extreme", it's mainstream. The first Community paintball episode was almost a decade and a half ago. Seeing a paintball gun or paintball hit in a movie or TV show is closer to "ho hum" than "hey, that's cool" these days.

Doc.

[iamthelazerviking]

My earliest exposure to paintball was positive at least, through church. I was still very intimidated by the idea of it because "it's gonna hurt!" but there were two brothers at my church who were known for being "pro paintball players", they were on Phantom Force and then I believe later on the Paraplegic Turtles. Paintball was also a common activity for the young men groups but I was always still so scared haha. It wasn't until a few years later a new kid at school I became great friends with got me into it. He had a decked Minimag and all the rad JT gear. There wasn't ever a "this is violent wannabe war" sentiment, it was more like my parents saying "if you want to do this you're paying for it"

[Slim]

Here is another example of how paintball has changed since it's inception...

We don't use cheap UVEX goggles anymore because too many people were getting hurt and we don't use paintballs filled with red paint because it looks too much like blood (and creates the perception of killing/injuring others).

Photos taken November 1986.

[DocsMachine]

Didn't Wolf's Lair eventually become EMR? Or am I wildly mistaken.

You couldn't drive down any major highway here in CT without seeing permanent oil-based paintball splats on almost every other large road sign.

-There was an article in an early APG, where some players spotted a highway sign in California, with a prominent hit on it. They made arrangements to go out there with a ladder and some cleaning stuff to wipe it off, due to the negative PR of it. Found it was an old oil-base hit that had long since dried.

As the article said, they found out later that yeah, that hit had been there for years, but there was nothing anyone could do about it.

I know that when I ran my field, we were occasionally consulted by the police who would be investigating the occasional act of vandalism. Fortunately for us, at the time, we were using RP Scherer, and were pretty much the only ones in the area doing so. Any vandalism generally used the bottled Brass Eagle paint only sold at one of the box stores. The cop would tell us what color it was, and we could usually say with confidence that it probably wasn't one of our players and definitely wasn't our paint.

Thankfully there was very little of that over the years, and now that it's more mainstream and accepted, any act of vandalism doesn't necessarily reflect on the sport now, any more than graffiti reflects badly on the manufacturers of Rust-Oleum spray paint.

Doc.

[Grendel]

lol, EMR - Endless Mud and Rain Yah, I was avoiding making the connection between Wolf's Lair and EMR when I mentioned it earlier. As EMR it is way better then what I experience at Wolf's Lair in '89

[The Hobbit]

Never would have guessed emr had such a history. I presume this was before blue got involved with the field. On another note I’d love to make my way out there again for whatever the modern version of castle is.

[Axel]

Yes, Blue had nothing to do with the Wolf's Lair incarnation other than eventually buying the property. George Funkhouser later ended up going to prison for some wild rare coin insurance scam, and floated off into obscurity

[DocsMachine]

We don't use cheap UVEX goggles anymore because too many people were getting hurt and we don't use paintballs filled with red paint because it looks too much like blood (and creates the perception of killing/injuring others).

-My first goggles were UVEX, and they worked fine, as far as the impact resistance went. I took more than my share of gogg shots and never cracked one. The issue was with the lens retaining in the frame- the lenses were absurdly easy to remove. Which early-me took as a benefit becasue it was easy to clean the paint out of the grooves.

But, I switched over to JT Whippersnappers as soon as I could afford some, mainly because they were far more comfortable than UVEX over a Woodstalker mask.

And, I found out later, that UVEX threatened to sue anyone using them in paintball- not individuals, but if any field or commercial operation was found to be using them, UVEX would have sued.

On the red paint, yep-yep. At my field one day, a player brought his own box of blood-red Superball that he'd mail-ordered. We spent the entire day panicking when another player came off the field with a huge bloody gash on his neck, or a thick stream of 'blood' trickling down his leg and soaking into his sock.

We had a first-aid kit, of course, and it wasn't unusual to help clean up a skinned knee or a minor cut, but thankfully we never had a "stabbed by a branch" type of thing. But that blood-red paint.... well, let's just say that if you wanted to shoot a [i]Texas Chainsaw Massacre" remake, it'd be the perfect stuff to use as fake blood.

We told the kid, at the end of the day, to please not bring the rest of it back.

Doc.

[Paintslinger16]

Uvex was probably fine with Splamasters, but dial a welts and of course the one idiot that put his balls in the freezer, they were super uncomfortable, thank god for JT racing.
we didn’t have a chrono for outlaw ball, so if the shot took the bark off the tree, we then turned it down..