70
The Top Historical Paintball Product Innovations, P
In a shock to the entire paintball industry and the attending teams, camouflage, long the default uniform for
any paintball player, was completely
banned. No team at the event was allowed to play on the Hyperball field if
they chose to wear camouflage to the
tournament.
The championships were held again in
1997, and the show was even better,
with live bands, body piercers, beach
volleyball and even extra-industry
sponsors like Corona. However, while
the World Hyperball Championships
were, according to most who attended, the first time paintball had ever
been promoted properly outside the
woods, WDP received little support
from the paintball industry at the time,
and found the events less than profitable, other than from a public relations
standpoint. After selling the Hyperball
concept to Brass Eagle, WDP turned
their backs on the paintball tournament promotions business to focus on
their hot new paintball gun, the Angel,
which was selling as fast as they could
be made. WDP remained out of the
tournament promotions business until
2003, when Pure Promotiosn and WDP
began promoting the National Professional Paintball League Super Seven
World Series of paintball tournaments
in the United States.
can’t easily clean the fields and it would
take a forty-foot truck to transport a
field. We went to Toulouse the next
year and saw the games played on Sup
Air fields and we realized it was a better system. You can fit an entire field in
the back of a van now.”
1996, Airball
At Paintball & Company, R.P. Scherer
and Powergames’ Toulouse seven-man
tournament in France in 1996, players found themselves playing behind
a completely new and alien style of
bunkers. Akin to the Hyperball tube
bunkers pioneered by WDP the year
before, Laurent Hamet and company
created colorful, dynamic new bunkers
that differed from anything paintball
had seen before, because they were
inflatable. For the first time in paintball’s history, bunkers could be blown
up, plugged, played behind, deflated
and carted off with little fuss. Unlike
any other type of bunker used in the
game or sport of paintball, the soft
inflatables encouraged incoming paintballs to bounce rather than break,
eliminating the mountains of shell and
buckets of splatter that often transform
Hyperball or other speedball fields from
futuristic-looking arenas into muddy
sludge pits, keeping the event spectator-friendly and colorful for the duration
Owen Ronayne formerly of WDP believes that the concept and style of play as well as allowing referees to much
more easily distinguish a broken paintof Hyperball were extremely influential
ball on a competitor. The nearly 1,300
on the future of the game, sport and
industry of paintball. “We invited teams spectators at the event reacted favorto play Hyperball to test the fields, and ably to the spectacle, applauding for
strong play and enjoying the event in a
one of those teams was the TonTons.
manner no American tournament could
Laurent Hamet was one of the first
advertise. Notable industry attendees
people to play Hyperball, and he went
away from that to develop SupAir (Air- included future National Professional Paintball League president Chuck
ball). For that reason, the impact of
Hendsch (then of RP Scherer), Todd
Hyperball is evident wherever you go
Adamson, Billy Ceranski, Fabrice Haltoday.” Ronayne continued, “Hyperball
mone, Ian “Jacko” Parsons and Adam
was great, but it was imperfect. You
January 2015
dECEMBER 2013