>>63905254
I actually used to be super into paintball in the mid-late 2000’s. I watched NPPL on ESPN and always wanted to play on the field they would set up on Huntington Beach. The thing is, things were already “dying” by this point.
Paintball got very popular in the 80’s and 90’s. It was dudes running around in the woods shooting each other and having a great time. We would call this “woodsball”. Sometimes people would organize massive games with hundreds of people and objectives to accomplish to make the game a bit more interesting than just shoot at each other. Those were called “scenarios”.
It’s important to understand that these were really what made the game popular. These groups of guys going out into the woods fucking around and having fun.
There was (and still is) this one place in socal that changed things up a bit. Instead of playing in the woods, their field has no trees and was like a little shantytown of wooden huts and buildings. This made it easier for spectators/people recording to see what was going on.
Some people (especially the professionals) did enjoy this style of play more. It was more action packed, less fucking around in the woods and maybe seeing someone. The fields got smaller and smaller, and the wooden huts turned into inflatable bunkers which meant you could really slide and dive into them. Now you could see the entire enemy team before the game even started and everyone was running around like a psycho. This is called “speedball”.
Massive paintball companies like smart parts convinced ESPN this was the next big sport, they paid a ton of money to host legit tournaments at legit places, it was really cool if you were one of the few thousand dudes playing on a pro or even D3-D5 team.
