The rise of paintball: colorful warfare

  • 2002-03-21
  • Jorgen Johansson
RIGA

In 1970 James Hale of the U.S. Daisy Manufacturing company invented and patented the first paintball gun. Originally manufactured and used for marking trees and cattle, this gun is now well and truly established in the Baltic states.

Played in more than 40 countries by millions of men and women of all ages and lifestyles the game is a combination of childhood games such as "tag" and "hide and seek." Add fatigues, paint guns and a will to kill, and you have paintball.

The Latvian Paintball Club was established in 1998 by Aleksander Andrejchuk who on March 2 opened the Baltic states' first paintball shop, located at 40 Valdemara Street, Riga.

Should one not feel like spending hundreds of hard-earned lats on a full paintball set it is possible to rent everything you need.

Most paint guns cost between 20 lats ($31) and 400 lats, but it is possible to pay much more.

Some of the most powerful guns fire five paintballs per second at a speed of 90 meters per second.

The game can also be livened up with the use of paint grenades - essentially water filled balloons.

The paintball itself is a round, thin-skinned gelatin capsule containing a non-toxic, water-soluble and biodegradable liquid which comes in many colors, including blue, pink, yellow, red and white.

Latvia lacks the kind of paintball regulations which exist in West European countries so people of any age can pick up a gun at the shop.

To the most obvious question - "Does it hurt?" - the answer is quite simply, "Yes."

It helps of course if you have a fair amount of natural padding, said Sergey Nagibin, an information technology manager from Riga.

"The paint balls don't always break and splash if I get hit in the stomach," said Nagibin, one of several enthusiasts who showed up on the shop's opening day to recall war stories as a homemade film from one of the Latvian sites rolled in the background.

Injuries can occur when players hit the ground while attempting to dodge flying paint balls or grenades. But that, apparently, is part of the fun.

"Look! That's me," exclaimed Nagibin, evidently enthused at seeing himself on the screen in full battle gear and protective mask among those running and crawling around a smoke filled site, apparently without any sense of direction.

"The best is when you hit your opponent. That's the aim of the game. The worst, of course, is to get hit yourself," said Nagibin.

The paintball club offers several different sites where one can play and the rules are simple and straight forward: shoot the opponents and try not to get hit - one hit and you're out.

There are, however, several different game types to choose from.

In "Capture the Flag" the object is to go out and steal the opponents' flag while protecting your own. "Elimination" is just what is sounds like - shoot everyone that moves who is not on your team. And then there is the possibility of designing mission objectives on your own whim.

The first real organized tournament in Latvia was last summer and involved teams from all over the Baltic states. The Latvian team Gummy Bears came out on top.

Every team has five players and two substitutes in case of injuries.

In Lithuania the game has been around for some time.

The attraction for Milisauskas Virgilijus, president of one of two clubs in the city of Kaunas, is the discipline it teaches.

"A good player learns from his mistakes. Most commonly players will wander off from their team and find themselves in a situation where it is very difficult to regroup an get organized with the rest of the team," said Virgilijus.

Paintball also provides better opportunities to commit acts of violence than his day job provides, admits Virgilijus, who when not co-ordinating the activities of the Legionares club is a policeman.

"Paintball is organized chaos," he said.