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Paintball (16045)
Paintball is a sport in which participants eliminate opponents from play by hitting them with paintballs shot from a compressed gas-powered gun, commonly called a marker. more...
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Video Games
Paintball draws a wide array of players, and the Sporting Goods Manufacturer's Association estimates that over 10 million people play annually in the United States alone. Insurance statistics show that paintball is one of the safest sports in existence, even more so than golf.
Games can be played either indoors or outdoors and take various forms, of which some of the most popular are scenario and speedball, also sometimes known as tourneyball under various circumstances. 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 and has even developed its own slang.
A game of paintball usually involves two opposing teams seeking to eliminate all of the other team's players or to complete an objective (such as retrieving a flag or eliminating a specific player, see Paintball variations). An average, non-professional game of paintball usually lasts around five minutes to half an hour. Since its inception, paintball has drawn a crowd of both casual and serious players. A full set of paintball gear may cost anywhere from under $100 to several thousand USD, depending on the equipment. Some players may invest hundreds of dollars in equipment to improve accuracy, rate of fire, weight, reliability, and comfort. Instead of purchasing their gear, occasional players may instead rent equipment from a paintball facility for about $10-$80 USD per day. The number of paintballs fired during a game varies from player to player; depending on a given marker's rate of fire, some paintball players fire hundreds of paintballs per game while others shoot a relatively smaller amount. Some players may not even fire at all during an entire game.
History
The first paintballs were created by the Nelson Paint Company in the 1950s for forestry service use in marking trees from a distance, and were also used by cattlemen to mark cows. Two decades later, paintballs were used in a survival game between two friends in the woods of Henniker, New Hampshire, and Paintball as a sport was born.
In 1976, Hayes Noel, a stock trader and his friend Charles Gaines, a writer, 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.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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