The Illegal Guns That Transformed Paintball 

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I guarantee you the guys who were just playing in the woods with tippmann 98's were having more fun than all these teams.

In middle school and high school in the late 90s, we would regularly have games 10-15 on a side out in the woods. Started off with a handful of guys had cheap pumps like Tigersharks but the majority were using sling shots or taking a weapon from someone who was already out. Eventually everyone had a gun, but some guys started bringing cheap semi autos like the spyder. Next thing you know there’s no more pump guns. Soon the $1,000 guns started coming and guys were going through a case of paint in an afternoon and we stopped playing in the woods and started playing in open ground because “it was more fun” according to the people with the expensive guns. That’s what ruined paintball for me. Started off being about stealth and tactics and turned into whoever had the most money to spend on guns and paint would win.

Probably should have gotten into the fact that the uncapped and high capped play at the start of this video led directly to paintball's massive collapse in popularity in the years immediately afterwards, as casuals simply left due to the huge cost of firing that much paint and what it felt like to get lit up. The damage was colossal and arguably has never really been repaired.

Remove electronics from the competition entirely. Go purely mechanical. Problem solved. This has been my TED Talk; thank you for attending.

Played paintball with friends. All mechanical, tipman's, spider, etc. Tons of fun, 5 v 5 on five acres of woodlands all with friends. That is what paintball was for me. We didn't go through tons of balls. For us it was, hunt, engage, retreat, flank, etc. more tactics than an overwhelming volume of fire. Never forget one game we did. 2 vs 15. The 2 won just from knowledge of the bore trails and being able to hit and run. Was a lot of fun.

I played competitive ball for years but finally got out when my team sponsor told me point blank that we had to start bending the rules to get more podiums. Some years later I took a group from work to a local indoor field for funsies. I left the Angel in the box and played with an SL-68 pump against the rental Automags, to keep it fair. There were a couple of walk-ons with electronic guns of some sort. I had a chat with them before the games started and made sure that they knew not to light up the nubies. They agreed. Of course, once we started playing, they couldn't resist dumping half a dozen balls into every new player. I pulled out the Angel and showed them what a pro overshoot at 16 BPS feels like. They left after that and I went back to playing pump. Good times.

I miss NPPL, especially on the beach. What a time to be alive.

My very first job when I was 16 at the end of the 1990s was at a paintball field. The Autococker was considered a respectable marker, (and about the only thing we had to watch out for was custom thumb dials on the rear that cheaters would use to dial up pressure after being chronographed in.) …but then the Angel came along, and after that, electronic guns really ruined the sport for everyday people who didn’t devote their lives and entire paychecks to buying the latest equipment. It got to the point where some refs would only allow electronic markers if a group rented out an entire field for private play. That didn’t go over well with pro and semipro players who were frequent returning customers at the business. When I started working there, it was a fun pastime people could come in and play like laser-tag - but 2 years later it was nearly impossible to bring new people into the sport, because the semipro and pro players spending ridiculous $$$ on custom gear with cheater electronics made first-time experiences terrible for newbies. It just became a niche moneysucking pastime for hardcore enthusiasts from there on, and decreased in popularity with the general public. I wished that the leagues would return to an analogue/mechanical-rule only, and ban electronic gizmos… but the use of electronic hoppers, etc. etc. had become too entrenched with the pro players - and they had invested wayyy too much money in all that kit to ever want to give up the electronic trend. To me, IMHO, paintball destroyed its own broad appeal and accessibility because it allowed electronics to niche the sport into increasingly expensive obscurity. Just my $0.02 having been a local ref at a local field back in the day when that transition happened.

I remember drooling over all the guns in my magazines while I’d take my Brass Eagle out to the woods.

The old clips of Addicted just gave me legit goosebumps and brought back that stoked feeling of being 12 years old staying up all night watching paintball dvds with the homies before hitting the field with everyone rocking 25-30 bps. Those Team Addicted dudes were the prime era of "swag" in the game and who we all just wanted to be like.

I remember the first time I ever played paintball. Everybody was running around with mechanical guns, then in the distance I heard some rapid fire. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. We got back to the staging area that's when I saw my first Angel

It's been 20 years and that clip of rocky cagnoni saying "doodoo brown!" Never gets old.

Oh man, that 2000 to 2006 era time frame was my favorite period of paintball. It was like a reintroduction of mystique into the game that was lacking for a while. The internet forums were abuzz with rumors and speculation about every little thing ESPECIALLY when it came to electronic paintball gear.

Why don't they limit paint capacity? You wanna fire 20-30bps? Well now your out of ammo, and just a target on the field.

I gotta say, this is the best video you’ve made. Accurate, and nostalgic. We had the electronic arms race 20 years ago, now the mechanical arms race is occurring. Interested to see how mechanical valves evolve.

Paintball died for me as a sport when the electrics came out. I started out with pumps with auto trigger then went with F1 Illustrator as a fun gun every weekend. I would use an auto cocker in tournaments. It was fun and affordable because I didn't have to waste more than a few hundred paintballs for the day. The good old times. I was in the Great Western Series back then. Played mostly limited paint tourneys.

I would give anything to go back to 2000's paintball 😢

Hearing the gear I used in my playing days talked about like ancient artifacts makes me feel about 1000 years old!

Would be cool to see 7 man at 15bps make a comeback as a spinoff series. The ICPL is insanely fun but truthfully the most fun I’ve had competing was in the UWL due to the limited paint, reinsertion at 10 min, and the unique roles each team got to field - scout, heavy, demolitionist, and the secret 11th stock class player. Always playing scout or stock class roles.

Brings back memories of playing on a team out of Virginia Beach in 1998-1999. I played a few nipple tournaments with an Automag w/ Z-Grip. Not the most practical gun but I loved the experience.

This was a nostalgia trip. I had to stop playing in 02 when I went to college it blows my mind what happened after I lost touch with paintball.

Damn, I miss this era of paintball. Played from 2001-2008 and had all these markers, what a fun time.

I am so happy that I got into the sport way before all this crap started happening. For anyone going to highschool, working at K-Mart, and trying to keep up with some other kids running a cheater board... it must have felt like this hobby made no sense at all. Glad I got to enjoy the days when the worst thing you had to deal with were talent, an Autococker, or the occasional cheater.

i'll never forget being blown away by how insanely expensive the full electric guns were, with the carousel loader. i had gotten a regular style machined paintball gun for christmas and all it has "extra" was just a long rifled barrel. i still use that gun today to haze off moose, but i would desperately outmatched playing against humans with turbo machine gun rigs that shot a literal stream of balls so fast it sounded like a single ripping sound

Lowering BPS can facilitate more movement, but I think anything more in that direction isn’t really needed. Sure, a pump or mech pro tournament might be cool, or a further BPS reduction could open up the field a little more…but the better fix is far simpler. Limit the amount of paint a team can carry. Paint manufacturers (and fields that sell it) wouldn’t love it, so idk how feasible it is. But for the sake of the game itself, a hard limit on team paint (e.g. 15 pods total for a 5-man team, split however they’d like) would be more effective. Shoot as fast as you’d like (or keep the current 10.5 cap, whatever), but you can only do it so long without harming the team.

God this is nostalgic af… paintball was my life for so long I can’t believe how much I’ve forgotten already…

I remember having a predator board and using the 20 bps full auto break out mode, super sneaky only worked on the 3rd trigger pull. Crazy cool tech for back in 2005

I do miss the older days of paintball at it's peak, your team was incredibly tight nit, in my case to the point where some of us lived and worked together. Had events most weekends and we were all obsessed with it, the shit talk and controversy that came with it all. I'll never forget those days

I don't play paintball, but I love paintball history. I miss going to the grocery store and buying the magazines.

It's been a solid decade since I played. The most advanced gun I ever had was a Tippmann 98 with an e-bolt (pneumatic ram setup instead of sear and bolt) and their cyclone feed on it (the valve is gonna waste the gas anyways, may as well use it for something). One battery, shot faster than anything I faced with regularity, and gave me probably my favorite comment ever from an opponent: "What's up with the old guy with the Tippmann and how is it so good?" IDK why the algorithm brought me to this video but I'm glad I'm here. Was a fun watch. My Cyclone feed had some mods to it, was fully capable of keeping up with the board. I never formally measured the BPS but the speed demo in the video makes me think I was at the pointy end of the range, over 15 for sure. I need to get some new air tanks and go play again. Show the teenagers that you can still get it in your 40s and over.

I think 10.5 makes for a more exciting game - but they could limit the tank sizes to 68 or smaller so you can either drive greater efficiency or bring out less paint. Either way, the regular players win as the game will get faster or the markers will get more efficient.

I traded an original iPhone for my friends Bob Long Intimidator. I was so obsessed with that gun.

Having lived through those times I will say the uncapped days weren’t better.

Unable to afford a high-end paintball marker, I purchased a Tippmann 98 Custom with a flatline barrel. I also acquired a double-barreled model with a custom double-trigger modification. By using just two fingers. Despite the significant cost difference, I performed quite well against opponents wielding paintball guns three times the price. Brings back so many memories 😂

As an embedded systems engineer who started out his career with arduinos with the AtMega microcontrollers (back then by Atmel, they were acquired by Microchip later) and I'm now designing with 32-bit ARM micros by STMicroelectronics and having played airsoft back in the day, I designed a custom fire control board with mosfets for power control to the motor. This video seems on some parallel level very nostalgic to me .

When I got into Paintballing in 2000 We had Auto Cockers, and Spyders, and Cheapo Tippmans, And then Angel came out and changed everything!!!

Still have my old DM4 with a tadao board with all the now illegal modes haha

I used to love paintball when I was a kid. I bought my first paintball gun in like 1998 or 1999 and I believe it was a greshish black swirled looking anodized Kingman spyder SE with an upgraded long silver and black barrel on it. It shot so straight and clean.

Great video, keep putting these out!!! R.I.P. A.K.A who knows what those guys would have put out if they hadn’t been screwed over…

OMG the woods with splatmasters!!! That is how i started. With hockey masks and sports goggles, we painted the hockey masks also!! then came the tippmans, than automags, autocockers, then the shocker, angels! i still have my custom 2005 shocker nxt! :) I helped start the Texas A&M program back in 96! :)

I raise my hand to take some of the responsibility for this BS.... Being the HALO guy, I can openly say I am so glad to have retired from playing before the effect of these guns really took hold. LOL

The U.K. had 14 failed criminal prosecutions of people alleging paintball were real guns, before civil servants decided on implementing new restrictive legislation.

This is my favorite video you've put out. The content was fantastic but the structure, timing, graphics... The whole execution was excellent. You're killing it.

Played a some in 1990s and 2000s. There was definitely 2 schools of thought in my experience. Those that loved the tactics and stealth of the woods and the ones that sprayed and prayed in the open areas with $1,000+ guns. I liked the idea of having tactics not who can get a lucky hit spraying an entire area at 20+ balls a minute.

I ran a Tippman 98 with a reactive trigger and a flatline barrel. Although I ran an electric hooper, it wasn't as fancy. I actually came up with the idea of extending the neck of the hopper a few inches. I achieved this by using 1 inch pvc water sprinkler pipe and wrapping it in electrical tape. This decreased the chance of exploding paintball. I was called out a few times, but nothing was ever done cause I was like 15.

Yo! Great vid! I’m from the era of Autococker and Automag 😂 with Dye barrels being the tiddies! When the Shocker (followed by Angel) first hit shelves, I was part of the crew that first started hacking it. We partnered with an electrical engineer meganerd, who went to town making custom programming and even ground-up board builds. It was wild and awesome! I believe the engineer and shop owner & captain of our PB shop, Jon, named the final board “Archangel”. This was all done in sight of the KFC Big Chicken, in Marietta GA. Good times… I wish I still had a Cocker to play with. I absolutely loved making custom parts, machining, hacking and rebuilding them. Thanks for the memories, dude!

Man you should have added the emag and how it got banned right away cause the rt mode was just too damn fast and provided an "unfair" advantage

I’ll never forget the day I went back to my folks house for the first time. My Angel is in a landfill somewhere. Along with my green spider with the electric trigger, I loved that gun.

Remember using the spyder rocket triggers on a victor

Man, this video brings back memories. I started playing paintball around 2000 with my first marker being a PMI Piranha which was a direct competitor to the Spyder. But, my weapon of choice for the last 20 years is still an OG 2004 Smart Parts Impulse Vision. It was the little brother to the Shocker: open bolt vs closed bolt, ran at slightly higher pressures, but was half the cost, super easy to maintain, and was a true "tinkerer's marker". Custom bodies, bolts, rams, hammers, valves, regulators, boards, trigger frames, triggers, feed necks, you name it. One of the most famous (and is equipped on mine) is the W.A.S. (Wicked Air Sportz) Equalizer Board which would definitely fall under the header of one of these original cheater boards. Everything was adjustable: bounce, debounce, dwell, max cycle rate, multiple programmable firing modes: semi auto, full auto, burst with user defined cycles (e.g. 3 shot, 5 shot, 10 shot, whatever), ramping to include the trigger pull rate required to activate said firing modes. Paired with the eyes, which weren't beam break style, you could set an "unlimited" firing mode where the cycle rate of the marker was only limited by physics. Literally it would cycle as fast as the inertia of the bolt assembly would allow which could get over 30 BPS with the right combo of pressure and weight. Paired with the "Freak" barrel system which had adjustable sleeves to fit different diameter paintballs and the newer style force feed hoppers, you could rip unreal streams of paint with pinpoint accuracy and never worry about breaking a ball. Compared to today's markers it's a brick boat anchor with terrible gas mileage, but it still turns heads when I dig it out and roll streams with it. With that said, once electronic markers started becoming more standard, most fields I played at quickly instituted rules disallowing any type of auto, ramping, or burst firing, and cycle rates were capped at around 10-12 bps because the field markers were all mechanical Tippmann 98 or Spyders. They didn't want 10, 12, 13, 14 year olds on their birthday parties getting ripped to shreds by folks with $2000 gear setups

As a former NPPL Division 1 professional player I can confirm the downfall of the sport for us was when they started trying to regulate and change the rules every year. Exceptionally few players actually got paid well enough to do it as their only job so the constant need to change the markers was expensive and it killed a lot of the top teams. Sponsors rarely paid much at all and often only offered discounts at the best.

Man. All I ever wanted was a sweet, tricked out autococker. If I got back into paintball that's still what I'd want.

I started playing paintball in the late 90s and the first rate of fire shenanigans I can recall are the Shocker Turbo and Automag RT. I quit playing in 2006 and just recently started looking back into it, the changes are pretty crazy with guns shooting so much slower, but the biggest thing I noticed is how much the sport has shrunk. Way less people play now than did in the heyday of the BPS wars.

The only thing that makes sense to me for a pro paintball league is that dedicated specific markers would be used for tournament play. Each tournament or league would need to supply the official markers for the players as rental markers. Providing the website and availability to purchase your own for recreational use of practice. Modification of a stock official marker would not be allowed during tournament play. Hoppers, tanks, and barrels would be acceptable. Before walk-on players would have to enter a staging area allowing them 1-2 minutes setup time (putting on barrel, hopper, and tank). Big brand paintball like dye and eclipse would need to pay the league to use their sponsored markers as sales would skyrocket specific markers. The league would be funded by marker brands. As well as league fees.

I remember being at NPPL Tampa in 2004, and seeing a friend from LA in the chrono area with a new DM4, pulled the trigger back 3 times slow, and it went 24bps basically full auto, pull the trigger once slow and it went back to normal. Also the robot was in Tampa, and it caught 0 people out. It was a total laughable failure. It just couldn't be programmed with all the permutations that existed with all the boards.

I’ve heard stories of magnets being used to activate a “cheater mode” on some boards. The magnets were stitched in side the gloves or jersey. When the ref would check the gun it worked fine. But when a magnet was close enough, it would activate the cheat.

They should have one tournament per season that’s an “anything goes” tournament. Lets see some insane guns out there lol

As a old guy who used to play paintball a lot this was interesting (an angel was my last gun and I stopped a couple years after that). Funny thing is, as a long time hacker I thought of a near impossible to detect "fix" for your custom firing modes pretty quick after you said the ref snatched your gun. Put an RF reader in the handle of the gun, and an RF chip in your glove (basically use the same tech as the nintendo amibos or a door entry card). Then the modes only enable when *your* hand is on the gun. The ref could snatch it instantly from you and it would never test "illegal" unless he stole your glove and put it on. And it your *REALLY* dedicated to cheating then embed the chip into your palm like the body hackers do. ;)

5 man Uncapped semi 3 people with 4 pods each as 'front' players 2 people with 6 pods as 'corner' or 'back' players Try to make the game interesting and ramp up action while relying on skill rather than just dropping lanes across the field in the hopes that one or two players get a lucky break

I miss the old days when you had to take care of guns and know what you were doing. I enjoyed messing with o-ring sizes and materials they were made out of, adjusting my hpr/lpr, and dwell. It was almost like a gate to keep people who didn't care out. I remember having different acceptable +/- depending on the paint that I shot. You had different grease for the temperature. It was an OCD kid's dream. The last guns I had to take care of were a DM14 and a Mac Dev GT. Now I see guns you can throw in your gear bag, change the battery once a month, and put any grease on.

Cheap true electropneumatic guns (not just mechanical guns with electronic triggers) are what killed paintball. What a lot of the "Get good" crowd don't understand is that the game is a LOT less fun as a casual player when you get lit up from head to toe every time you're eliminated. The pain-to-pleasure ratio starts shifting heavily towards pain, and the learning curve gets a lot steeper. This tends to turn off both younger people who are getting into the sport and older players who just want a casual game. If you wind up with 5-10 welts every time you're eliminated instead of 1-2, you tend to call it a day a lot sooner and seriously consider whether you even want to go back. Once these guns got so cheap that a middle-class 10-12-year-old could reasonably get one for Christmas or birthday, it basically killed the stream of new players entering the sport because overshooting became the norm instead of the exception.

In my day I rocked a blue/black fade ‘05 Proto Matrix with Virtue Board installed, blade trigger, Dye Throttle tank, blue/black Freak barrel with insert kit, and a rip drive Halo B. Good times. If I remember correctly my Virtue Board allowed me to fire up to something like 35 bps or something, and tourneys allowed ramping, but capped us at 15 bps. Ollie Lang was everyone’s idol. It’s been years lol.

technology ruined paintball

I started Paintball in 1985. My team took 3rd in the Nationals Tourny in Pittsburg PA in 1987....with Nelspots. That was when skill was valued, woodsmanship, camo and teamwork. I got out in the mid 90s, when arena ball took over and firehoses replaced skill. Last serious time I played was mid 90s, helping a buddy open a field in SE Indiana. After the first match, (30 v 30), a kid ran up to me with his shiny new angel and told me that he had spent 2000 rounds had gotten a kill! I replied I had fired 200, and had gotten 6. Long story short, I'm not impressed with where the sport has gone.

such a quality edit! great story telling as well!

Played my first game of paintball in 1994. I was wearing shorts and a tank top. I got lit up so bad. It was the most fun I have ever had. I still to this day have my vintage Tippmann Factory F/A full auto. Play on a few local tournament teams Bad Karma, Ouch Factor, and Crimson Halo. Fun times.

"ION, VIRTUE, LETS DO IT" god fckin damn that video will forever be engraved in my memory. god what a time it was

I remember lending a teammate my custom Naughty Dogs Intimidator at a tournament when he got spot checked going to the field. He was DQ'd for the match and the gun was confiscated until the end of the tournament for bouncing. The gun was so hard to stop bouncing, I gave up. Couldn't tune it out but I didn't want a horrible trigger pull either. Compared to today's paintball, I think it is fine where it's at. I do like semi 15bps cap but I'm ok with 10.5bps ramp as well. I do miss shooting lanes at 15-20bps knowing the other player isn't making it through without a hit. Things got spicy back then at those speeds. Lots of overshooting. Lots of bonus balls for whining to the ref.

Some friends and I all started playing paintball way back in the day around 2004 maybe about 14 years old. we all had our Brass Eagles or Spyders and we would just go into the woods behind my house and had an absolute blast. Around 2005 we transitioned to speedball fields for some reason, and they all loved it while I found myself enjoying it less. This video really brought it full circle for me. I assumed speedball was always this way when it turns out we walked right into the BPS wars. I am very happy to hear that it has changed and plays around 10BPS which is more than enough, won’t need to buy paint as often, and games become more tactical again rather than just roping paint non-stop.

10.5 ramping is the future. Its good at keeping a level playing field

I remember when the Shocker came out the Angel then All American...back then I use to use a Micro Mag on a remote system with a tiny 48tank in my pack. Our team actually placed 2nd at the Worlds in Orlando in I think 95' . We all had AutoMags, Rtmags, and I run a MicroMag. The Eguns really changes the game by players just laying paint . I think the skill levels of players would have been higher today if there were all truly semi auto

airsoft is still better but cool vid

Thanks to the algo for randomly sending me down paintball memory lane. My main markers in the 2000's were a side feed Autococker pump conversion w/ a 50 round hopper and a Carter Buzzard. $20 in paint a day was all it took to embarrass all the Angels, Intimidators, tadao board modded Dye's. Thanks to the local pump legends and team Blowfish for teaching me the way of stock class...NGL I had the modded, ramping, Halo hopper setups too. Dumping paint was fun occasionally.

I remember back in the early days I could shoot a ridiculously high rate of fire using the responsive trigger system on a tippman 98 custom, and I very regularly had refs at my local fields checking to see if I could even fire a single shot because they couldn't believe how fast I was able to shoot. I was definitely a field dominator with that gun, it was heavy but it was accurate and it could rip off some pretty precise high rate of fire. I eventually would move on to the Dye Matrix 2004, and played many tournaments with that, but I was not really a high rate of fire player with that setup. I regularly wouldn't even bring extra pods for reloads, knowing I could finish the round with just my hopper load. I played division 2 with the DM4, and won first place in a few 3 man tournaments during that era. My two teammates would lock down the field, our back player would pin down the left side so the other team couldn't cross to the left, and my other teammate would bump up the center while I would work my way down the right side of the field, I would move into position and take slow accurate timed shots at them from the side while my teammates laid down suppressive fire the entire round. Fun times man, wish airsoft never became popular, because paintball was just a million times better.

As one of those Splatmaster-in-the-woods players from the late '80s, I still remember the shock and awe of being on the receiving end of my first barrage from a Tippman SMG-60! I can't imagine playing against modern guns...

I agree that the funnest play is when the gun and rate of fire is balanced with player agility and skill. When the technology overtakes the player then it takes away from the game. It just becomes pay to win.

My first "job" in the 90s when i was 15/16 was a paintball referee. It wasnt paid in dollars, but rather in game time and free paintballs. Seeing all these old machines really brings me back ♥️

I’m 32 now. Started young. Played with a local team. Toured the country for free. Practiced with active military members. Paintball was life! Fast guns didn’t bother me. My fingers and feet were fast enough to get into the snake and work up the field. I didn’t love getting shot 10-20 times each time but that was paintball. I still have a scar on my knuckle from playing with nearly frozen paint. Love paintball. Still got an old jersey in my closet.

Thank you for rehashing my teenage years for me. It was a wild time to be playing

My buddy had a dwell ramping DM4. What a time to be alive.

As someone who played as a kid, I loved paintball but it died off as a sport/hobby because it's just a luck game now. Shooting thousands of paintballs, having no idea where you're even hitting, yet hoping to see someone down range raise their hand. These lame kids killed it.

lol. I remember trying to get into paintball in like 1996 and my poor ass tried renting pump paintball guns with 2 friends. And you guessed it, we got lit up and had a terrible time playing against dudes with awesome custom paintball guns.

I was big into paintball in 2000 as a freshman in high school for about two years. My rich friends had tippman 98s with the banana barrel which ruled the remnants of 1800s farmhouses and barns we played in, I had a brass eagle silver eagle which I got made fun of for but it was more reliable than some of my friend's rigs they tried to customize themselves with expensive aftermarket mods. We had more fun building forts and courses in our our woods than actually playing bc someone always got hurt. My best friend fell from his dads second floor hay loft in mid sprint; we heard him sprinting then nothing followed by a thud. Luckily he had no serious injuries, but likely a concussion. His dad lost his mind the next day not realizing he had given us permission to play in there the night before as he had been drinking at their annual community pig roast. Those were good times

2:15 just made me tear up (crying). I had this exact Bob Long poster in my room growing up, and my dad had the red to yellow "sunset" fade Intimidator. Memories I'll have forever and would never trade.

i loved the plinking fun you could have with these kinds of boards. but as for tournaments and competitive play i always kept it on semi. we practiced like crazy to get our fingers up that fast, and it was a badge of honor to hit 15 on semi with no bounce or ramping.

Randomly came across this video and brought back a lot of memories. I was around during the Mag/Cocker wars (still have an Automag VHS maintenance video) and then years later got back into and had a DM7. Lived in So Cal and played against a lot of local pro teams that would show up to the parks. Spoiled living down there and having so many shops you could just walk in/find anything like ANS (again, this was 2008ish). Just blows my mind at the advancements in tech. Scrolling paintball shop websites today, I don't recognize half the stuff I see. Still sell my old favorite paint though (Ultra Evil).

Hahaha!! Unfortunately, my team,Ignition was a Bob Long Delta team. My teammate was a micro electrical engineer. He worked for Medical device company and invented the Halo and the early sound boards. There were no Rules at NPPL Las Angelas (?) tournament in the early 2000’s. We mopped up and people were pissed. The “Ignition board” and all other ramping boards were banned the next tournament.

To this day I still take my F1 Illustrator or my Smart Parts Impulse over any of that crap. I always had problems with my hopper not being able to keep up with me. Great video!

I grew up in Colombia in the 90's and early 00's and paintball was extremely rare and very expensive. I went a handful of times but they are to this day some great memories. Wooded areas with semi auto Spyders conserving as much paint as possible. All about tactics and stealth.

I haven’t competed before but I play recball often. Sometimes I feel bad even shooting 10.2 ramping lol. I think it’s quite fast enough. Gives people more time to move, which makes the game more exciting

We played paintball from 1998-2002 in northern NJ. I got my brothers Talon and then I got my own tippmann SL68. My brother had an Automag and most of our friends had tippmann 98's and spyders. We would play our own speedball course but mainly we would play in the woods on about 10 acres which was way more fun. It is sad to hear the paintball market market plummet.

My brother was kitted out like an airfield player but preferred woodsball. Took great enjoyment in making teammates do double takes whenever he'd empty his hopper in 5 sec. I was a walking E-trigger, could make a standard 98 fire as if it had one in it. Confused many a ref with that

i still have one of those boards for a shocker SFT from team all americans (velocity/dwell ramp), somewhere in my basement that i got from the taneytown PAP field when i worked there, from a friend. i also used to talk a lot with Chris Clark about the Impulse cricket upgrade software "ECS", fun days!

This is a fun retrospective. As a punk kid paintballing then, these were all the changes that drove us crazy. That, and guys constantly having those silly autocockers falling apart. In recent years I've tried to track down media of the old Bob Long gear for our art folks, but all that stuff is lost to time now.

I love that he mentioned the OG shoebox shocker I still have one and it shoots great but it has the factory turbo / LS board and it also has a cover over the selection switch to make it semi or turbo that you have to use an allen wrench tooth pick or whatever to switch it no way to just use yr finger mid game to switch the switch from semi to turbo. I also recently found a Glacier AT board for it on ebay that still works so for a shoebox i think i have a pretty good setup

I love my OG bob long and its button. Hold it down for a few seconds on power up then push again to cycle through settings. Only took a few seconds to switch into full auto. But another I have that’s my favorite is one of the original all mechanical Autocockers. Love the clear tubes out of the secondary regulator.

I had the Tippman 98 custom, Spyder, BKO, then a Smart Parts. It was always a blast playing in the woods.

I had a first gen shocker back in the day, and the trigger was so screwed up it fired on both pull and release. It was a gem, even though the RoF was low.

I never really programmed my boards to shoot extra, but I had my triggers set so sensitive that I could cough and it'd fire. I was Semi-Auto firing 20bps on my old Timmy. Used to run 12 pods as a back player in PSP and NPPL because I just lauched paint downfield.