Chapter 1

An Introduction to Paintball

Numerous myths surround the invention of paintball. It’s probably true that just about any kid growing up during the 50s and 60s thought that it would be a great thing to be able to shoot some kind of real bullets out of their toy army guns.

Lots of us did, in fact, do just that. Remember the admonition that if you play with a BB gun, “you’ll put your eye out with that thing!”? (This is precisely the reason why I had to borrow a friend’s gun when I wanted to play BB gun and dirt bomb wars.) Who can blame parents’ reluctance to let their children play with toys that can cause permanent injury?

In the late 1970s, the Nelson Paint Company developed a gas-operated gun and marking pellets for a variety of industries, including Forestry and Ranching. The guns and pellets were used variously to mark trees for removal, cows to be culled from the herd, and essentially anything else that required putting a semi-permanent mark on an object from a distance.

Given that the folks using these guns were normal American outdoor types, it probably took less than thirty seconds from opening the package to the first cowboy-on-cowboy paintball war. Whoever was involved in that encounter can lay legitimate claim to having played the first ‘paintball’ game.

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The remainder of this chapter summarizes the development of paintball as a commercial activity and highlights its major developments to date.  I also provide a capsule time-line of major developments and accomplishments, describe the kinds of people who participate in the game, describe a typical game and then cover the ten commonest myths associated with paintball.