The modern sport of paintball got its start more than thirty years ago, when some friends were discussing a trip to Africa one of them had just come back from. He had been hunting buffalo and got everyone excited about the idea, but they wanted to experience the adrenalin rush safely and in their own backyard. So they decided to figure out a way to play war games with each other with some form of gun substitute that wouldn't be harmful if hit by. A few years later they actually played the first ever paintball game, with a paint marker normally used to mark trees and livestock by farmers. They didn't even have a standard pump paintball gun like we're used to today. Not everyone had a paint marker in this game and in fact no shots were fired, but with a dozen people playing that game the idea sparked their imaginations and paintball took off.
In the early days, not everyone had pump paintball guns and people would literally hurl the paintballs at the opposing team members by hand. However, as the popularity of the sport skyrocketed it spawned an industry of custom made merchandise. Just as baseball had to be invented before anyone bothered manufacturing proper baseball bat, it was the same for the paintball guns we're familiar with today. PMI and several rivals began fighting for dominance in a growing market and innovated with newer pump paintball marker designs and then refillable air canister paintball guns and even paintball canons and pump action paintball machine guns. The rest is history and today paintball is a rich and diverse sport popularized around the world.
