Paintball draws a wide array of people, and the Sporting Goods Manufacturer's Association estimates that over 5.4 million people played the game in the United States in 2007, with over 1.5 million playing at least 15 times that year.Insurance statistics show that paintball is one of the safest sports, with fewer injuries per exposure than sports like football, soccer, basketball, baseball, golf, and bowling.

Games can be also played either indoors or outdoors and take various forms, of which some of the most popular are woodsball, scenario, X-Ball and speedball. Rules for playing paintball vary widely, with most designed to ensure that participants enjoy the sport in a safe environment. The sport requires a significant amount of equipment.

A game of paintball usually involves two opposing teams seeking to eliminate all of the other team's players or to complete some other objective, such as retrieving a flag, eliminating a specific player, or other paintball variations. Depending on the style of paintball played, a paintball game can last from seconds to days.

History

In 1976, Hayes Noel, a stock trader, Bob Gurnsey, and his friends Mark Chapin, a S.W.A.T. officer, and Alex Rieger, a Green Beret were walking home and chatting about Gaines' recent trip to Africa and his experiences hunting buffalo. Eager to recreate the adrenaline rush that came with the thrill of the hunt, and inspired by Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game, the two friends came up with the idea to create a game where they could stalk and hunt each other.

In the ensuing months, the friends talked about what sorts of qualities and characteristics made for a good hunter and survivalist. They were stumped, however, on how to devise a test of those skills. It wasn't until a year and a half later that George Butler, a friend of theirs, showed them a paintball gun in an agricultural catalog. The gun was a Nelspot 007 marker manufactured by the Nelson Paint Company.

Twelve players competed against each other with Nelspot 007s pistols in the first paintball game on June 27, 1981. They were: Bob Jones, a novelist and staff writer for Sports Illustrated and an experienced hunter; Ronnie Simpkins, a farmer from Alabama and a master rhino hunter; Jerome Gary, a New York film producer; Carl Sandquist, a New Hampshire contracting estimator; Ritchie White, the New Hampshire forester; Ken Barrett, a New York venturer and hunter; Joe Drinon, a stock-broker and former Golden Gloves boxer from New Hampshire; Mark Chapin, a trauma surgeon and hunter from Alabama; Lionel Atwill, a writer for Sports Afield, a hunter and a Vietnam veteran; Charles Gaines; Bob Gurnsey and Hayes Noel. The game was capture the flag on an 80 acre wooded cross-country ski area.