Paintball

Paintball is a competitive team shooting sport and hobby in which players eliminate opponents from play by hitting them with spherical dye-filled gelatin capsules, called paintballs, that break on impact, fired from low-energy air weapons called paintball markers powered by compressed air or carbon dioxide and originally designed for remotely marking trees and cattle. The game was invented in Henniker, New Hampshire on June 27, 1981, by Hayes Noel, a Wall Street stock trader, and Charles Gaines, an outdoorsman and writer, after a debate between the two men over whether a city dweller had the survival instincts of someone who had spent his youth hunting, fishing and building cabins; a friend of theirs came across an advertisement for Nel-Spot cattle-marking guns in a farm catalogue, and the pair used the guns to settle the argument by organizing a capture-the-flag contest they called the first annual Survival Game, played across one hundred acres of forest divided into four quadrants. The hobby is played casually for recreation and also at a formal sporting level, with organized competitions, major tournaments, and professional teams and players.