Where, When, What?

[Grendel]

Nov 1988, Combat USA (Vanguard Paintball) Koon Store Rd Columbia, South Carolina using a Piranha Long Barrel borrowed from my friend who got me to go out for my first time. This was just a couple weeks before my 23rd Birthday. I played one game and told him (Jim) I was buying the Piranha Long Barrel from him, didn't ask just told him. We played paintball every weekend after that until it was time to go out to sea on our next patrol. I played so often that the owner Dennis Day and I became pretty close along with several of the staff at the time. Eventually they asked me to join the staff. I drove an hour and a half every weekend one way to play/ref at Vanguard for several years. Then after Dennis's death I supported the next iteration TriggerTyme while his nephew and friend were running the field. This is about the time 4 SCRK members, myself included, opened up Paintball Charleston. I have been part of paintball at varying levels ever since that first game. I am looking forward to getting back to South Carolina and reconnecting with some of my old teammates. I am one of the few who are still "active" but we have been talking about revitalizing the old travelling Scenario Team that SCRK was during the 90s and 00s.

[mtaylor]

It would have been around 2002, we had a birthday party at the local indoor field. I remember some form of colourful spider being the rental guns.

[glaman5266]

First game ever: In the woods behind grandma's house with my brother on Christmas of 2002. We each got BE Blade '02s for Christmas & played in the snow. We wanted to try paintball for a while before that, and it was a ton of fun even as cold & wet as it was. To this day I always give plastic BE markers their due. Doesn't matter what marker it is if it gets you hooked.

First "proper" game: The local supplier hosted an outlaw game at one of his friend's place in the summer of 2003. Used a brand new JT Excellerator 6.0 I got for my 17th birthday. That's where I first met the shop owner & ultimately went on to ref many of his future games & do a little gun work for him on the side. He became a great friend & got me to spend a lot of money on paintball stuff, lol.

[homerj]

The first time i played was sometime in 98. I’d bought i think 3 Talons from Walmart for me, my brother & a guy i was friends with at the time. We just kind of messed around, running around an old half standing chicken house & some other half standing sheds, barns, etc. The first “real” game was when my friend saw a note on a bulletin board at Kroger where some guys were looking for other people to play with. They had already been playing for a little while longer than us & were playing on a little island out in a lake. We were fairly intimidated when we showed up because a couple of them had Cockers & i believe we had M98s. It was fun & we actually kept playing with them regularly for the next few years. I don’t remember when exactly we played at a commercial field for the first time but i don’t think it was too long after meeting those guys. I really miss those days.

[Marauder_Pilot]

It would have been early '00s (2003?), at the original iteration of the Flagswipe Paintball indoor arena in London, ON (Not the big warehouse speedball field/proshop that closed a few years ago, this one was a super cool urbanish indoor field). The rentals were some kind of Spyder clone, probably PMI Piranhas since I remember Flagswipe being big on those back when they were relevant. I distinctly remember that they didn't have bottomlines, they just hucked a 9oz or something right into the air inlet on the body.

I had a blast. I can still distinctly remember the smell of the place, and ogling the then-brand-new A-5 Stealths they had on the wall, and some regular showing off what I'm pretty sure was a very chrome E-'Cocker of some variety.

Good times. Kinda sad now because Flagswipe was one of the strongest and longest-running fields in Ontario and they just closed their last field, the big outdoor field outside London. The indoor speedball field closed in 2018 I think. The proshop itself is still going, but I can't imagine that'll last long between COVID, the loss of the field and the general anxiety around airgun sports in Canada right now with Bill C-21 floating ominously in the background.

[acrewofone]

First time I ever played was around 2000, games organized by my work as a team building exercise. We played at Route 40 Paintball near Baltimore, MD. The field was owned by the Maliszewski brothers of team "Image". They were selling paint they had won at tournaments for $200 for a case of 2000. The next time I played was also for a work team building exercise, but we played that time at an indoor field near Baltimore, can't remember the name (might have been Delmarva Paintball in Salisbury MD), but I do remember that there was sand everywhere, you had to dump out your shoes between games. First marker I bought was an F4 Illustrator, but when I saw and shot my first Angel ("it's so fast and smooth"), I had to buy one of those. I enjoyed the sneaking around, the joining with a buddy to flush the enemy out of a bunker "you shoot at him to keep his head down and I'll run to the side and pick him off.", the being part of a group sharing a common experience and the stories of great shots and play, told at the staging area (mostly tall tales).

[Cunha]

My dad and I had some famous bunkering situations on the bigger fields shooting steel drum bunkers that really make a racket and keep the heads down. We would take turns being the rambo and being the support guy. One field had a mandatory surrender rule for point blank encounters, one time my dad and I surrendered a single fort bunker with 6 guys in it.

[TouchofGrey]

1st game 1984 at Strategy Plus in East Hampton CT. Shot a Nelspot. Pump handles were not on the market yet. Good times and RP Scherer .688+ paint. $1 a tube and 50 cent CO2. It was a time of true paintball heros.

[Jonnydread]

My first game was, I think, in the summer of 1999.

My buddy's older sister had a friend, Dave, that had some land out in Loudon, New Hampshire where he would play. Our parents gave us a ride out to the land, which ended up being a redneck graveyard of old cars and construction equipment. I had a newly bought Spyder Xtra with co2 and a 32° Head Case pair of goggles and I got my ass handed to me. Dave was rocking some sort of autococker (which seemed like alien technology at the time) and just shooting the crap out of us and to me and my friends' middle school perspectives we thought he was some sort of paintball god. Looking back he was probably a cocky high school kid beating up on some newbies, but at the time I was in awe.

That day went terribly on paper, my gun was shooting all over the place, I chopped like there was no tomorrow, barrel breaks, mask fogging... just awful. Even with all those issues I remember the adrenaline just coursing through my body and feeling like I was involved in a high stakes version of tag and I couldn't stop smiling. From there on out I lived and breathed paintball. I would buy APG and 2Xtreme and whatever other magazine I could find, and I spent dozens of hours on PB Review writing overly verbose reviews on low end equipment with shaky anecdotal evidence at best. I got hooked on upgrading my Spyder and every penny I could spare went back into paintball... until I found out about girls, but that's a different story.

My love affair has waxed and waned throughout the years, but I always find my way back.

I
Just
Can't
Quit
You
<3

[lew]

Started playing woodsball at my uncle's house near Brighton, MI spring '97 with a loaner Pro Lite.

First field experience was Hell Survivors in '99 with my Classic Spyder. Got into Cockers shortly after.

[MrBarraclough]

First game was at some commercial field (forget the name) off Blue Angel Parkway in Pensacola, Florida, just north of Naval Air Station Pensacola. Would have been in the Spring or early summer of 1994. I rented some Nelson-based pump with a chrome barrel for $25 because the $35 for renting a VM-68 was too steep for my 12-year-old budget. Had an absolute blast running through the palmettos with my heart pounding like it was about to explode. It was like someone opened a magic doorway into the action movie universe for a few hours.

I had anticipated that day for months, ever since I had stumbled across the December 1993 issue of APG at the bookstore in the mall while Christmas shopping with my parents. That issue had Fred Schultz from Constant Pursuit on the cover, rocking a Pro-Lite with a remote line. I pored over that magazine front to back and back to front until it must have disintegrated. A few months later I bought my first set of secondhand gear, a beat-to-death Tippmann 68 Special and some JT Elite goggles with this awful molded plastic mask that was like a hockey mask but with way fewer holes. I found a field closer to home and eventually hooked up with a group of guys who regularly played on some private land in my hometown. On my 14th birthday I got the best present I ever received: a 68 Automag. Cut an awful lot of grass as a teenager to buy barrels, hoppers, remote lines, venturi bolts, and whatever else I "needed" to upgrade and reconfigure that Mag, along with better masks, lenses, and of course paint. Played pretty regularly until I went off to college in 2000. There wasn't a field in town, and my buddies were all either back home or scattered to other colleges. So my gear sat in my bag in the back of the closet. College turned into law school, which then turned into working. Got married, bought a house, had a kid. The Mag and the gear just sat in the bag. After 20 years, a friend invited me to go play with a group from his job. They had booked a private party last May, as soon as the initial lockdown ended. I was surprised there still were paintball fields. Before I had even gotten back home from playing that day, I had a rebuild kit from AGD on its way.

[JonM]

My first game was with a bunch of co-workers somewhere back around '96 or so. We played at The Foxhole which is now OXL in Linglestown, PA. We all played with rental Spyder compacts except for one guy who brought his Automag. Not long afterwards, I drove out to Wanna-Play Paintball's pro shop back when they were in their old shop and picked up a Spyder TL+, a Scott mask, and a few other things to get started.

After a few years, family life and responsibilities got in the way and I had to hang it up until Lurchness Monster got me back into it in 2013. I've been hanging out with this group of reprobates ever since.

[Chuck E Ducky]

Started in a friends backyard with a VM68 a good 20+ years ago.

I got really hooked when I found competitive Paintball. Lots of stuff was changing at the time so good gear could be had cheap so maybe it was my financial situation changed more then the gear but I was playing 3x a week for years starting in 2006. Had full sponsorships and a few teams that would pay my way when I guested for them. Now I like Rec play with limited paint and Stock Class the best. I have tried every type of play but Stock Class is for sure my passion when it comes to paintball. I still play some of the major Mech events and local 10 man events. Looking forward to ICC, Philly, and Woodsball World Cup (because it’s in my backyard). But for the most part I cut back because life, time, and money. I still play regularly I get out every weekend in the spring summer fall. Winter I cut back a bit in the cold and I don’t play if it’s raining. But I will play Stock Class until I physically can’t anymore. The people and friends I have made threw the sport are 2nd to none.

[Jonnydread]

Given the old bastards at Slim's I think you got quite a few years for SC play buddy

[Chuck E Ducky]

I hope so.

[wunderbarsafari]

First game was in the hills behind my house in winter of 97-98 sometime. Some family friends had two sons who were given a couple of Stingrays and Z Leader goggles for Christmas and needed someplace to play. Along with my brother, the four of us traded off playing one on one until we ran out of paint. Everyone else enjoyed the novelty, but I was hooked. Played at home with friends all through my teenage years.

My first game at a field was late in 2000 at Central Valley Paintball in Visalia, CA. It was just some netting and legos in an orchard, but it felt like paintball heaven. There were a couple GWS feeder events held there so we had some local tourney players playing walk-on. That was my first time seeing hot-rod shockers, autocockers, and mags in the wild. I still have a picture of that day- I’ve got the model 98 and my best friend has the Raptor.

[Trueblue]

First game in 1998 at Swan Creek paintball. Our academy class went out together on a weekend. Best part was the classmate that set it up showed up with a PGP and a vest.
He told us he played when in the Air Force at different bases and we thought we had him being armed with Pro-lites.

Got hit by him, first shot off the break.
Took a few years of playing here and there, and some friends pestering to join them and their team.

Did that and never looked back, and was the last one still playing, finding a new team.
Not going to quit until I can't move, or there is no where to go.

[ChoSanJuan]

First game in 1998 at Swan Creek paintball. Our academy class went out together on a weekend. Best part was the classmate that set it up showed up with a PGP and a vest.
He told us he played when in the Air Force at different bases and we thought we had him being armed with Pro-lites.

Got hit by him, first shot off the break.
Took a few years of playing here and there, and some friends pestering to join them and their team.

Did that and never looked back, and was the last one still playing, finding a new team.
Not going to quit until I can't move, or there is no where to go.

Small world... Must have started playing there at the same time.