The History of Paintball

Paintballing is one of America’s fastest growing extreme sports. For those unfamiliar, paintball is a shooting activity utilizing a marker (gun) that uses compressed air to fire balls of paint. Ammunition is made out of spherical gelatin capsules filled with water-soluble color.

The sport came into being back in the 60s, when forestry workers used to shoot paint to temporarily mark trees. These early models could only shoot short streams of paint, before the U.S. Forestry Service asked Charles Nelson of the Nelson Paint Company to produce pellets that could be fired from a distance, resulting in a gelatin sphere that was strong enough to be fired from a gun yet still splatter on impact. The innovation was a success, and even ranchers began to use the markers to identify lost cattle.

The original gun that fired these pellets was the Nelspot 707, manufactured by Crossman, though the company quickly ended production for lack of profitability. Nelson then turned to another air gun manufacturer, Daisy, to produce the new Nel-Spot 007, which was patented in 1972.

At that time, paintball markers were pretty much only used for ranching and forestry, but sometime in the late 70s, a stockbroker named Hayes Noel and a writer named Charles Gaines were having drinks in a bar, theorizing about a survival game to play in the woods, wondering how city-slickers like themselves would fare in simulated combat. After learning about the Nel-Spot 007, Gaines and his friends Noel and Bob Gurnsey drew up the rules for their National Survival Game. On June 7, 1981, the world’s first paintball session took place on an 80-acre farm in New Hampshire. The game was a free-for-all capture-the-flag format with 12 players.

Everyone predicted the country folks were going to do the best, so it wasn’t a surprise when forester Ritchie White captured all his flags without firing a shot. The experience proved to be exhilarating. One of the participants, Bob Jones, a writer for Sports Illustrated, quickly published a glowing article about the game. Gaines and the Gurnseys got letters from all over the country about people who wanted to play the National Survival Game. Later in October, the group held a second game for the public before Bob Gurnsey opened the first commercial paintball facility in 1982.

A number of innovations have happened since then, with the sport rapidly growing and hitting its peak in the mid-2000s. While the wave of success has slowed down, paintballing cemented itself as a favorite pastime of adventure sports enthusiasts.