Developer: Sunstorm Interactive
Publisher: Wizard Works
Paintball is essentially a first-person shooter - in fact it is probably the most intense FPS and certainly the only one where players feel real pain when they are shot. The basic premise of the game is based around players dividing into teams and heading off into the woods (or occasionally in a converted warehouse for indoor games) where they play a modified version of "capture the flag." Players are armed with guns that fire small balls of paint, and are usually referred to as "paintball markers" to avoid too militaristic a tone for the sport. The object is to shoot the other players with these special guns and avoid being shot yourself. Special equipment like mandatory facemasks are strictly required, while padded gloves and plastic vests are often used to provide extra protection.
In the late 1990’s paintball was one of the fastest growing sports in the United States and as a game it attracts people from all walks of life, mainly because it is extremely fun to shoot at other people yet because no one is seriously hurt, everyone can laugh after a hard fought match. It is also a sport where you don’t need to be pumped up like Duke Nukem to be good! Because it involves guns and shooting paintballs, it seems like it would be an obvious sport to simulation as a computer game title.
In fact there was a paintball simulation from Head Games called Extreme PaintBrawl, which can probably go down in history as one of the truly worst games of all time. It suffered from lackluster graphics, virtually no AI and settings that had absolutely nothing in common with the game of paintball. And although there have been paintball “mods” for Quake and similar games like Nerf Arena Blast, Extreme PaintBrawl was such a bad game that it seemed unlikely anyone would ever try to create another paintball simulation.
