The History of Paintball

Series Summary

Paintball is a sport in which players use air or gas-powered guns which fire balls of paint to tag and eliminate other players from contention. There are numerous paintball games, like Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, and Elimination, and the most common forms of play include Woodsball and Speedball. There is a wide range of paintball gear and equipment available, but the helmet and goggles are the most essential equipment for safety purposes and preventing serious injury. The popularity of paintball continues to grow in both pro leagues and amateur circles, and it is estimated that over 10 million people in the United States play the game annually.

In this free video series, our expert Dan Foss will show you all about paintball, including: paintball parties, paintball markers, types of paintball guns and balls. Dan will teach you a bit about projectile speed, and paintball accessories. He will even teach you how to maintain and upgrade your markers and show you about splatter and different game types.

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village I'm Dan Foss and here to tell you about paintball. Hello, I'm Dan Foss with Arizona Paintball Adventures. I'd like to talk to you about a little history on paintballing. About 20 years ago a bunch of guys got together, thought they'd want to go out and play some kind of scenario war games where they could tag each other. They picked up on some Nelson products, which were markers they used to marks cows and trees, and that, and it was oil-based paint at that time. And they went out, and of course they didn't have the sophisticated gear that we have now. So anyway, they worked on this scenario war game, decided that they wanted to get a little more sophisticated with it, so they came up with some different markers, from Nelson and that, and they went out and came up with a paint that they could use, which is more bio-degradable and water soluble. They decided that the oil based paint was too hard, left too many bruises and that, so now we have a 68 caliber paint, which is this stuff right here, that's the size of the paint, a round 68 caliber ball. It is bio-degradable, will wash out of your clothes, it usually will dissolve from the morning dew in two or three days, so it's not going to leave a mess out there, in the field. Okay, well now it's revolved into a worldwide professional paintball, speedball scenario, woods ball, there's a lot of games on across the country and around the world. We have different classes of paintball out there now, from amateurs, novices, right on up to the pros that are working on the circuit right now running, there's teams like the Dynasty and a few of those teams out there that are getting paid to advertise paintballs, clothing and guns and that."