Your beginning in paintball.

[automeister]

This is a great thread. The Gloria Gaynor sprinkled in is a nice touch lol

[Heavy_D]

1999ish Hockey Team round up, hit up Paintball Action Games Edmonton's, now defunct "Kamo-Koulee" outdoor field by Leduc, AB (RIP was a amazing outdoor field).

played with a Rental PMI Piranha, Blew my mind and got me hooked. bought a used rental Piranha from the field as my first marker a couple months after first playing.

[Ecapnation]

Practically a villain origin story.

My father started in 1983 before I was born and when I turned old enough to hold his Spartan he let me shoot it in the back yard. My 9th birthday he let me go to the field and play with his team but I was told I had to use a pump because he didn't have a spare semi and his guys were playing semi.

Which at 9 I earned a nickname in couldn't spell right because long Islanders can't pronounce things normal.... His buddy in reference to my playing style was "Your kid Pak, he's tiny and aggressive like a freakin' jackal!! He doesn't care that he's out gunned." I started to call myself. "Jackel" after that.

It stuck. So did my ability to never be outgunned with a pump. That was 33 years ago. I'm 41 now.

[RhoXi]

It was 2001 and all of my friends were talking about this paintball thing. You mean you get to run around the woods and shoot each other like an IRL videogame? Sign me up! I recieved a Tippmann 98 Custom that Christmas and played my first game a couple weeks later.

We were playing at a friend's older relative's mostly defunct horse farm 2v2. It was frigid and snowy that day and my teamate and I were walking up the road towards an old barn. Suddenly the realization struck me that there was a very real possibility of getting shot. I mentioned to my teamate that I was nervous about getting hit. Right then he spun around and shot me square in the leg point blank. To this day, it's still one of the most painfull shots I've ever taken. I ended up miserable the rest of the day and the whole experience turned me off paintball for a couple of years.

I picked it back up with new friends in highschool and played a lot but then discovered I enjoy tinkering more. Fell out of it again in college but picked it back up a few years ago. Now I play just a couple times a year and resurect old relics in between. Still have that 98c btw. It's the one in my avatar.

[Daltech]

Camp Pendelton, CA circa 1996.

First time ever, first game.

Dad put me in a track suit, so I wouldn’t get his truck dirty.

Tippman 68 Carbine.

I put paintballs that I picked up from the ground in my hopper along with dirt and leaves. When I took it to the field rental table the guy was pissed. “ what’s these branches doing in here”…

[boomersruckus]

This is my son at his first ION event. He had done one other big game but it was quite small compared to ION. It was Vipers Quest for the Holy Grail. He had played tourneys with me but big games are what hooked him.

Watching him in the inflatable Dino suit blasting the Allies storming the beach was epic. Every year he is a different inflatable creature for ION. He was definitely the first to do it but it has caught on..... Unicorns last year. Tons of them.

We are both on the starting box in the tourney pic. Playing tourneys with your kid is both awesome and terrible at the same time. Alpha male, emotinally driven, man childs are sending pain at 300fps and some of them cannot take it. So they get stupid. Tempers flare and well, its not fun to see....

[Sneak Miester]

I think it was 2004, one of my co-works had a stag party at a local Edmonton outdoor field, Quest for Adventure. 3 of us from work attended, rental marker I think was a piranha or Spyder not sure which one. Had a great day of fun and was hooked. Bought a Brass Eagle tiger shark, well that didn’t last long. The next week me and co-worker went out and bought markers, he got a Tippman A5, I got a Spyder Rodeo. I ended up meeting some great guys playing at PAG indoor. One of them started a reball field, my Spyder struggled to shoot 230 which I think was the limit. He had an Angel, one sweet ass marker, I was like I got to get something better. Bought a ICD Promaster and upgraded the shit out of it. Played some local tournaments at PAG indoor, I remember Impact reffed the game, Bart had the refs check my gun 3 times as he thought I was ramping….it was so fast, fastest marker I ever owned. Got my 2 boys into the game, bought Spyder imagine, Icon, tippman 98, SP Ion,DP FUSION. Won a 3 man tournament at PAG, then I was asked to join a team and compete in MR Nationals in Calgary. So I bought a 07 Macdev Cyborg to compete. We won every game going into finals, our goal was to make finals, I was 46 then (2008). Lost every game after that lol. Played a lots of Big games at Youngguns, Excalibur for many years.
Then I got rheumatoid arthritis, this really impacted my play, then COVID hit, fields close down. Now I have heart issues too, this ended my paintball career. I held on to my markers thinking “one day I will be able to play again” but 4 years later I came to realize that this would never happen at 64 years young.
Looking back playing with my kids where some of the best times.

[The Inflicted]

I first played in 1995, in the 8th grade, as part of a school day trip. The school I went to had both day and boarding students, and to keep the boarding students occupied they often scheduled outings on the weekends to various activities. I had heard of paintball before, mostly through seeing pictures of gear in the US Calvary catalog, but wasn't particularly interested until I learned that a few of my best friends had recently started playing and would be going along. I really didn't know what to expect when I got on the bus heading from the school to the field, but some of my friends had their own gear in backpacks, guns like Spyders and Pro-Lites, and it all looked really cool. Arriving at the field, the vast majority of us boys were renting gear, and the field had a big assortment of Nelson-clones available. I ended up with a NW Sales Spitfire II of all things. All the games were in the woods, and while there wasn't much in the way of structures besides brush piles and the odd half-finished shack, to me it was an exciting and terrifying new world, and even before the first game started and the various teams started to formulate various strategies and plans I was already totally excited. I was never that good at sports and usually found all their rules pretty boring, but suddenly here was a game where I could use my own imagination and cunning to decide how to play, which was so much more engaging and liberating than doing lining up and running where my football coaches told me.

I don't recall how well I did or what I did for the first couple games but I remember not doing that well but still having a pretty good time. For the last game of the day, though, I definitely remember hanging back and hiding behind a brush pile just before our flag station. The suspense of hearing the battle all in front of me but not being able to see it was incredible, especially as it slowly began to die down as more and more of my schoolmates eliminated each other. Suddenly, I heard leaves crunching in front of me and popped up to see my friend Josh, who was on the other team, running right towards me with the flag. We both opened up on each other, him with his Spyder Compact and me with my rented Spitfire, and by some miracle I managed to hit him on the shin just as he got me in the lens. I can't remember which team won that game but I do know that I had finally managed to eliminate someone and I was totally hooked on the game.

All through high school I was obsessed with paintball. While I never had enough money to get into the tournament side of things, my focus on wanting to play as much as possible and improve as much as possible drove my growth in other areas. I learned to use the internet and build crappy websites through trying to learn as much as I could through WARPIG and other places. I couldn't afford decent gear, so I finally learned how to use my dad's tools and work with metal in trying to improve my pitiful Stingray. Whenever I walked through any store I was always thinking in my head, "How can I use THIS for paintball?" I've stuck with the game for thirty years now and always managed to avoid the mainstream tournament scene. What appeals to me now just as when I was a kid was how the open format of the game allows so much individual thinking and innovation, and the homogeneity of the tournament format just feels like it sucked the freedom out of it.

[Trbo323]

Oh man. Mine is kind of embarrassing, here we go

Ok. Played paintball a few times, birthday parties and what not around 2000. Always liked it but never had the money to do it myself. I'm in highschool and I buy a nitro RC stadium truck. Great hobby for a highschool student. But as I get close to graduation I decide I'm going to sell it and buy a bigger RC truck. I go about selling it, didn't get as much as I was hoping but have cash now and am browsing eBay. I found the next truck I want just not at the price I need. In my browsing I come across this paintball marker. Here's the conversation I have with myself.

"Hold up. This is an electronic paintball marker? And it has different firing modes!? A double trigger like the pros use!?+?!) AND IT'S NEW!?!?!?(?(++)&&(?

IT'S AN ANGEL AND IT'S WORTH $600! "

the auction is only at $89 with like an hour left!

*Puts in $100 bid*

I'm going to buy this angel, turn around and sell it for $600 and that will be all the money I need to buy the RC truck I really want. "

I won!!!!?!?

I realize it's a local shop that was selling it so I arrange to just pick up, go get it, bring it home. And then, only after I have it at home type in "piranha GTI" into a Google search to get the specific details on this marker I just bought



Turns out, I paid $90 for a marker that is worth $90.

But! I actually already had a mask because a summer camp I went to played slingshot paintball so I figure, I just need a cheap hopper and a 20oz co2 tank and then I can go play. That's exactly what I did 21 years ago and I still don't have another RC truck.

Sent from my motorola edge 2024 using Tapatalk

[TwonTamal]

Middle School, 1999. I forgot exactly how my friends and I decided that we wanted to acquire paintball markers. Honestly, it may have been a natural progression from bb guns and lazer tag to yearning for a bit more. After convincing our parents that this would a good idea, my mom arranged a trip to visit my Uncle who had a paintball business in WV. After getting set up with some Spyders, we took them out to my grandparents house and were horsing around where we would just run around in the field, no bunkers or anything and try to shoot each other. We had a blast and knew that we needed to take them out to a field to play for real. We were all hooked after that!

[Riot]

Can’t believe we couldn’t even get to the chorus, way to suck, boys.

[Pumps4ever]

This thread is awesome, I gotta locate some old school 1980's Pics...

[Cdn_Cuda]

Dammit, now I have Cake stuck in my head.... but I will survive.

First paintball experience was at a hockey wind-up party. Played a couple times, and then my dad took my out to place in Kelowna, Safari Ridge to play. I just remember my marker getting jammed and having to get my dad to fix it. Had some buddies get interested and buy some Spyder Xtras and my dad took me to the local store and we bought an Pie2 whatever spyder knockoff. Had a summer or to playing with my now Brother-in-Law at Big Shots and it was a ton of fun. Been downhill ever since!

[$L!mBo]

pasted from "your exposure (lol) to pump":



My younger brothers and I started playing when Ft.Detrick opened up their paintball fields to the public on weekends. We had a shop a couple blocks from there where we bought tippmanns and ions and spyders and our gear. Used to love going wide and flanking all the speedball guys in their backs with my a-5. When we all got to the final years of high school, we stashed our gear away and hung it up for good.....or so i thought. When the shop (Paintball Wholesalers) had to close up, I bought a bunch of flexes, revvys and a bunch of other gear for closeout prices. In this lot was a tricked out,, cut and annoed eblade cocker i paid $70 for. This haul went into the closet with the rest of it.
Almost ten years go by and Im working at a local hotrod shop doing custom fab and efi swaps on old Stingrays, Stangs, Fairlanes, ect.... We hire a new guy who "cant work Sundays because hes on a paintball team." I drag out my old gear and he goes crazy, like he just struck gold. I sell him the cocker for $100 and he comes back with another $300 after the old heads on his team told him it was worth much more. They had a swap meet the next weekend where i came out, met the guys and sold most of my treasures. They dragged me back into the sport and after learning the dark arts of tuning from the old guys, i built a mag and a cocker. It felt like fight club, i had to get out there every weekend and scratch the itch.
One day two 14 year old kids show up with their "Grandpa's old gun". A Lapco Grey Ghost, setup for 12grams and rocking a 50rnd winny. I was fond of trading guns with the rental kids for a game or two and they let me use the pump for a game on the airball field. Into the snake off break and past the 50 side after gogging the only dude who saw me, some hotshot with the newest ego/luxe/dm whatever. from there, i took out the rest of their team one by one and had the most fun game of my life. I was instantly hooked on pump.
A few weeks later, I nabbed an openclass phantom off ebay and played with that exclusively for weekends and big games. A duckslide build popped up on facebook and i took the plunge into stock class. This years Slim's Spring Game (2023) was my first time actually playing sc, Id been too busy to make it out for any weekends leading up to the trip so i was limited to backyard shenanigans for my training wheels. Slim's was the best time Id ever had playing ball and now its the only format that interests me.

to add to this^:

getting ready to start year 2 of hosting our own stock class/pump events at the home field!
and shenaniganiganny GANs in the woods outback my house!! its become my m.o. to convert as many folks to pump and stock class as possible. the pool of awesome folks getting into the scene around here grows and grows. our events are gaining a great reputation. PAiNTBALL FO EVA!!!

---

[Psycho91]

My best friend in middle school got into it and I followed suit on my 15th birthday (06) since then I have lived, eaten, and breathed some form of paintball since then, IV walked away several times just to end up coming back, I can't really get out to play but I'm in a position where I can build some markers here and there, hell if it wasn't for this forum I probably would have stopped playing 10 years ago or so, I used to play so much everyone always wanted me on their team used to have dreams of being a pro but of course could never afford it at that level lol

Played with a 98 with a 14 inch proto barrel and a massive drop that put it right in front of my face, ran an eggy later a halo and 45/45 crossfire tank, polished the internals and mowed faces with it for like 3 years before I got an ion