Paintball Magazine Paintball.Media Magazine October 2019 | Page 58

I’ve been saying it often lately: it’s a feel-good time in paintball! JT is back on top of the pro paintball podium thanks to the recent success of X-Factor in the NXL, ten-man woodsball and Hyperball are booming thanks to events like the incomparable Iron City Classic and mechanical markers are experiencing one hell of a renaissance! I seem to remember a time in paintball that most were convinced nobody would buy a paintball gun that cost over a thousand dollars – now there are companies out there selling out preorders of custom markers costing every bit of that and then some! A company both at the forefront of the resurgence of mechanical “classic” paintball, and certainly a brand that helped usher in that resurgence, is Simon Stevens’ Inception Designs, and their Ripper Autococker is a piece of hardware you simply have to see and shoot to believe! 058 paintball.media magazine My introduction to Inception’s Ripper Autococker was an unintended one – of course I was aware of their existence and that they were gorgeously cut and lusciously anodized, assembled by-hand from a heaping parts kit of Inception’s proprietary components, but I’d never played with one and hadn’t given doing so much thought. I have a bunch of Autocockers, not to mention Automags, Eclipse markers, Empire guns and just about anything I need to hit the field. The only problem? I hadn’t brought any of those guns or that gear to the 2019 Iron City Classic – just my camera and a pair of goggles. So when my good friend Michael Karman and Northwest Rogue came to me looking for a body (which was a qualification I apparently met), I said yes but promptly suffered a minor panic attack as I had no gear to play the event with. I’m actually not kidding so quit laughing.