A Bit Of History
Wayne Dollack is the undisputed originator of role-playing scenario paintball. His first game, Cash In Action, took place in Ocala, Florida in 1985. Thirty-eight players showed up for the game, each putting a few bucks in a pot. The purpose of the scenario was to find a tower that had been constructed and hidden on the field. The team that found the tower and successfully took control of it from the defending team, won the cash pot. Wayne told me,“ Because we only played on the weekends, we started playing at about 10 AM, and by 4 PM, everybody wanted to go home. So one day I thought that it would be fun to have a night game. We would start playing at twilight and continue until... whenever. The shadows change so you can get a lot closer to someone creeping around. So we organized a couple of these night games, and they went really well. So then we decided, " well, let ' s go straight through the night, into the next day, and play 24 hours."
Dollack continued, " Lenny Lancaster was a Vietnam Veteran, who played paintball with Dollack at the Survival Zone. He used to play role-playing board games. He did fictionalized war games, where you would roll dice and move accordingly. He used to go to the National Board Games in Texas where he was known as GOD( Game Operations Director). Lenny played about three of those early
24 hours game. One day he came to me and asked: ' Have you ever thought of, instead of just a storyline, actually using role playing, where players could portray another person for the period of the game.' I thought that was a great idea, so we incorporated what he had done in the board games into what we were doing in our scenario games. That ' s how the role-playing part came into the scenario game.”
In the early days of Dollack’ s games they would actually play all night. By the late80s players began to show up in themed appropriate costumes and that lasted decades. Wayne obsessed over props, which became his early signature.“ I often went overboard. For example, I did a game based on Rocketeer in the late 90s. I spent over 1500 dollars on a rocket backpack. We actually built two of them— one was to take apart so the two sides could find the parts on the field to rebuild the unit. It was quite impressive. I have built space ships, a helicopter, stealth aircraft, an X-Wing fighter, and most even a submarine."
078 paintball. media magazine
The many faces of Wayne Dollack throughout the years.