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The Top Historical Paintball Product Innovations, P
1994, the Kingman
Spyder
Until 1994, paintball was quite the expensive sport. Cases of 2,500 paintballs
were often sold for over one hundred
dollars and the average pump paintball gun, the standard for entry-level
paintball players at the time, still cost
in excess of one hundred dollars or
more. While semi-automatic paintball
guns had been in existence for some
time, the reliable semiautomatics,
such as the Tippmann 68 Special or
Pro-Am, F-2 Illustrators from FASTech
and the Automag, easily sold for well
over three hundred dollars, with some
models costing a great deal more than
that once all the accessories needed to
play the game were factored in. While
some “low cost” semiautomatic models
had been introduced to that point, their
reliability had been extremely questionable and none had met with any degree
of success. This all changed when Kingman, a company that had experienced
some success with a line of pump
paintball guns called the “Hammer” released what would become a phenomenon; the Spyder.
The early Spyder models featured brass
lined barrels with porting, a stackedtube aluminum body design reminiscent of the VM-68/PMI-3, a Lonestar
M16 grip frame, single trigger, sight
rail, standard bottom-line CO2 tank
adapter and a power feed, an accessory that, until that time, was reserved
for top-level paintball guns like the
Automag. Lightweight and possessing
a simple blowback design, the inexpensive Spyder immediately began to
fly off store shelves across the country,
and before long the Spyder had become the best selling paintball gun in
the history of the sport. A line of acJanuary 2015
dECEMBER 2013
cessories was quickly introduced as the
Spyder became a family of Spyders,
and Kingman became a paintball powerhouse. Twenty years later and the
Spyder is still available, now in about
15 different forms and configurations.
1994, Palmer Stroker
Upgrade
Glenn Palmer (Palmer’s Pursuit) introduced his first auto-cocking paintgun
in 1989 with his Hurricane Rifle. Five
years later Palmer introduced his PMI/
Sheridan pump-gun conversion upgrade, turning PMI markers into auto-cocking “Stroker” markers. The
Stroker upgrade included advanced
pneumatic automation, an efficient
valve system and “quick strip” disassembly.