When the Sports Illustrated article ran after the first game ever played and calls and letters came in by the hundreds how surprised were you ?
There was never , ever , any doubt in my mind , before or after the article , that the thrill of playing “ Survival Games ” as we called paintball at that time , was going to have mass appeal . Even though Sports Illustrated would not let us put contact information in the article , vast numbers were able to reach us wanting to know how and where to play the game . Two weeks after the article an entrepreneur from Maine offered to buy half the business . Everything pointed to the idea being a really good one ; we were in !
From then on the issue became how to harness the enthusiasm--creating a business model , managing publicity , opening fields , getting equipment into players hands , and , most importantly , maintaining the mass market appeal by not allowing the image or direction of the game to be dominated by hard-core types .
086 paintball . media magazine