Paintball

Paintball is a sport players eliminate opponents from play by hitting them with paint filled, breakable, gelatin paintballs shot from a carbon dioxide or compressed air powered \"paintball marker\". more...

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Paintball draws a wide array of people, and the Sporting Goods Manufacturer's Association estimates that over 10 million people play the game in the United States annually, with 1.9 million playing at least 15 times a year. Insurance statistics show that paintball is one of the safest sports, with fewer injuries per exposure than sports like tennis, golf, and bowling.

Games can be also played either indoors or outdoors and take various forms, of which some of the most popular are woodsball, scenario, X-Ball and speedball. Rules for playing paintball vary widely, with most designed to ensure that participants enjoy the sport in a safe environment. The sport requires a significant amount of equipment.

A game of paintball usually involves two opposing teams seeking to eliminate all of the other team's players or to complete some other objective, such as retrieving a flag, eliminating a specific player, or other paintball variations. Depending on the style of paintball played, a paintball game can last from seconds to days, although typical woodsball games are five to thirty minutes long.

History

The first paintballs were created in the 1970s by Charles Nelson of the Nelson Paint Company of MI, Inc. in Kingsford, MI for use by foresters in marking trees from a distance, and also for use by cattlemen to mark cows. The earliest versions of paintballs were made from wax, but they were not sufficiently durable, and soon softgel encapsulation was identified as the best method of containing the paint in a projectile that would survive being rapidly accelerated when fired, yet break on the intended target. Two decades later, paintballs were used in a survival game between two friends in the woods of Henniker, New Hampshire.

In 1976, Hayes Noel, a stock trader, Bob Gurnsey, and his friends Mark Chapin, a S.W.A.T. officer, and Alex Rieger, a Green Beret were walking home and chatting about Gaines' recent trip to Africa and his experiences hunting buffalo. Eager to recreate the adrenaline rush that came with the thrill of the hunt, and inspired by Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, the two friends came up with the idea to create a game where they could stalk and hunt each other.

In the ensuing months, the friends talked about what sorts of qualities and characteristics made for a good hunter and survivalist. They were stumped, however, on how to devise a test of those skills. It wasn't until a year and a half later that George Butler, a friend of theirs, showed them a paintball gun in an agricultural catalog. The gun was a Nelspot 007 marker manufactured by the Nelson Paint Company.

Read more at Wikipedia.org