03/04/2026
It all started with a debate between friends in the early 1980s. Author and outdoorsman Charles Gaines, known for writing 'Pumping Iron', argued with his friend Hayes Noel, a stock trader from New York City, about survival instincts.
Could a city person who had never been in the woods survive against an experienced woodsman? They made a friendly wager to settle it.
In June of 1981, they gathered 10 other people in the woods of New Hampshire for the first-ever 'survival game'. The participants included a writer from Sports Illustrated, a surgeon, and a movie producer.
To 'tag' their opponents without causing injury, they needed a special kind of tool. They discovered the Nelspot 007, a pistol originally designed for ranchers and the U.S. Forestry Service to mark cattle and trees from a distance with oil-based paintballs.
They didn't use referees for that first game. Instead, everything was based on an honor system. If you were hit, you were expected to remove yourself from the game. It was a test of character as much as skill.
The winner of that first game wasn't the woodsman or the city slicker. It was a forester named Ritchie White, who used stealth to capture all the flags without ever firing his marker.
One of the original players, Bob Gurnsey, saw the potential. In 1982, he opened the first commercial paintball field and branded the activity 'The National Survival Game'.
From there, the sport grew rapidly. Innovators like Dennis Tippmann introduced automatic markers, and safety equipment improved, turning a backyard experiment into a global phenomenon built on ingenuity and an old-fashioned honor code.
