Timber, cattle,
and a bet in the woods
How Charles Nelson's paint capsule became the Nel-Spot 007, how twelve men in Henniker turned it into a game, and how Bob Gurnsey turned the game into an industry.
Charles Nelson and the encapsulated pellet
The Nelson Paint Company was founded in 1940 in Kingsford, Michigan, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula — timber country. Charles Nelson and his brother Evan built the firm around industrial and marking paints, and Charles in particular had the habit of looking at a customer's daily annoyance and asking whether paint chemistry could solve it.
The annoyance in this case belonged to the U.S. Forest Service. Foresters cruising a stand of timber had to mark individual trees — which ones to cut, which ones to leave, where a boundary ran. Doing that meant walking to each trunk with a brush, a can, or a spray gun. Across hundreds of acres of steep, brushy, insect-ridden ground, the walking was most of the work.
Nelson's insight was that the paint did not need to be carried to the tree. It needed to arrive at the tree. If a measured dose of marking paint could be sealed inside a capsule that would fly straight and burst reliably on impact, a forester could stand on a trail and mark timber at a distance.
The gelatin capsule
The container Nelson landed on was already in production for an entirely different purpose: the soft gelatin capsule used to dose horses and livestock with medicine. Filled with oil-based marking enamel instead of medication, it became the first paintball — a projectile that carried its own paint and destroyed itself delivering it.
The delivery system was the other half. Nelson approached Crosman, the air-gun maker, and the result was the Crosman 707 — the first commercially produced marker built to fire his paint capsules. It worked, but it did not sell in the numbers Crosman needed, and the company withdrew from production.
We invented the encapsulated, washable paintball. The Nelson Paint Company
Rangers, cattlemen, and thirty years of real work
Before it was ever a game, the paint-shooting marker spent roughly three decades as a piece of professional equipment — and it is worth being clear that this was not a curiosity. It was in genuine daily use.
Foresters and park rangers used it exactly as Nelson intended: marking timber for harvest, flagging hazard trees, painting boundary lines along property and unit edges, and tagging trees for survey work. The oil-based fill was the whole point here — a mark that survived rain, snow, and months of weather until the crew came back to cut.
Cattlemen and ranchers found a second use. Sorting, culling, treating, or counting livestock normally meant getting close to the animal — stressful for the herd and hazardous for the handler. A pellet pistol let a rancher put a visible mark on an animal from across a pen or a pasture. Nelson advertised the Nel-Spot pellet pistol in farming and ranching magazines as fast, safe, and economical, accurate on an animal from roughly 75 feet away.
Wildlife managers and game officials extended the same idea to animals that could not be handled at all: marking deer and other game for population counts, tagging problem animals, and identifying individuals in the field without trapping them.
Why oil-based paint mattered
- Permanence. A forestry mark had to survive a full season of weather and still be legible when the cutting crew arrived.
- Visibility. High-pigment enamel read clearly against bark, hide, and undergrowth at distance.
- Adhesion. It stuck to rough, wet, dirty surfaces where a water-based paint would run or wash away.
Every one of those virtues became a liability the moment humans started shooting each other. Oil-based paint does not wash out of clothing — a problem the sport spent its first decade solving.
Daisy builds the Nel-Spot 007
With Crosman out, Nelson needed another manufacturer. He found one in Daisy Manufacturing, the Arkansas air-gun company best known for the Red Ryder BB gun. Daisy's James Hale reworked the design, and in 1972 the company released the marker that would carry the sport into existence: the Nel-Spot 007.
Built exclusively for Nelson and stamped with the Nelson Paint Company name, it was a pump-action, .68 caliber pistol powered by a disposable 12-gram CO₂ cartridge — the same cartridge used in pellet guns. Steel and cast alloy, finished in Daisy's characteristic dark grey.
| Specification | Nel-Spot 007 |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Daisy Manufacturing, for Nelson Paint Company |
| Introduced | 1972 |
| Action | Pump-action, bolt-action feed |
| Caliber | .68 (approximately 17 mm) |
| Power source | Disposable 12 gram CO₂ cartridge |
| Shots per cartridge | Roughly 15–20 |
| Feed | Gravity-fed tube, about ten rounds |
The numbers explain almost everything about how the early game was played. Ten rounds in the tube, fifteen to twenty shots in a cartridge, and a pump stroke between each shot. Nobody laid down covering fire. Every shot had to be worth taking, which made stealth, patience, and position the whole game — and which is why the earliest players describe the sport in the language of hunting rather than of combat.
Twelve men in Henniker, New Hampshire
The argument came first. Hayes Noel, a Wall Street stock trader, and Charles Gaines, a writer and outdoorsman, had been going back and forth over a question with no obvious way to settle it: does a man who has spent his life in the city have the instincts to survive in the woods against someone who grew up hunting, fishing, and building cabins?
It stayed theoretical until a friend came across an advertisement for Nel-Spot cattle-marking guns in a farm supply catalogue. Here was a device that could put an unmistakable, non-injurious mark on a target at distance. The argument now had a scoring system.
On June 27, 1981, twelve men gathered on roughly one hundred acres of forest in Henniker, New Hampshire, for what they called the first annual Survival Game. Alongside Noel and Gaines was Bob Gurnsey, a sporting goods retailer who would prove to be the most consequential of the three.
The format of the first game
- Twelve players, each armed with a Nel-Spot 007.
- About 100 acres of woodland divided into four quadrants.
- A flag station in each quadrant; players had to collect a flag from each and return to a home base.
- Every man for himself — this was not a team game.
- The winner: G. Ritchie White, a forester, who collected all four flags in two hours and fifteen minutes.
The detail that gives the day its meaning is that White won without firing a shot in the telling that has come down through the sport — the forester, moving quietly through terrain he understood, simply avoided everyone. Noel's original question was answered, and not in his favour.
Something else happened that day that the participants noticed immediately: the game was enormously good fun. The men who spent the afternoon stalking each other through the New Hampshire woods came out wanting to do it again — and, crucially, one of them thought about who else might want to.
Bob Gurnsey builds an industry
Gaines was a writer. Noel was a trader. Bob Gurnsey was the one who saw a company. He formed National Survival Game (NSG) — the first business built around paintball — and put three things in place that turned an afternoon's entertainment into a repeatable product.
Exclusive supply
Gurnsey contracted with Nelson Paint to become the sole distributor of its paintball products — controlling the ammunition supply for the entire nascent sport.
Equipment kits
Rather than sell parts, NSG assembled complete kits: the Nel-Spot 007, paint, goggles, and the accessories a new player or new field needed to start.
Licensed fields
NSG licensed its brand and its rules to franchisees who opened their own fields — the model that spread paintball across the country.
In 1982, the first commercial paintball field opened in New Hampshire (in Sutton, roughly a year after the Henniker game), and the franchise model went to work. A prospective field owner did not have to invent a sport — they bought a licence, a rulebook, a supply line, and a name customers had heard of.
Gurnsey also did the unglamorous work of codifying the rules: what counts as a hit, how eliminations are called, what safety equipment is mandatory, how a field referee operates. That rulebook is the direct ancestor of the standard rules still used at commercial fields today.
In 1983, NSG held the first national championship, with a $14,000 prize for the winning team. Two years after twelve men wandered into the woods with cattle guns, paintball had a professional tournament with real money on the line.
The timeline
Eight decades from a Michigan paint shop to a global sport. Scroll to reveal.
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1940
Nelson Paint Company founded
Charles Nelson and his brother Evan start the firm in Kingsford, Michigan, building a business around industrial and forest marking paints.
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1950s
The encapsulated paint pellet
Nelson develops a way to seal oil-based marking paint inside a gelatin capsule of the kind used to dose livestock with medicine — solving the Forest Service's tree-marking problem at a distance.
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1960s
The Crosman 707
Nelson partners with Crosman to produce the first marker built to fire his pellets. Sales disappoint and Crosman leaves the project.
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1960s–70s
Rangers, ranchers, and wildlife managers
The Nel-Spot pellet pistol is advertised in farm and ranch publications. Foresters mark timber and boundaries; cattlemen tag livestock from roughly 75 feet; game managers mark wild animals for counts and control.
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1972
Daisy releases the Nel-Spot 007
James Hale of Daisy Manufacturing reimagines the marker. The pump-action, 12 gram CO₂ pistol is built exclusively for Nelson — and becomes the gun the sport is born with.
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June 27, 1981
The first organized game — Henniker, New Hampshire
Twelve men play a four-flag capture game across 100 acres of forest. Forester G. Ritchie White wins in two hours and fifteen minutes. Hayes Noel, Charles Gaines, and Bob Gurnsey are among the players.
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1982
National Survival Game and the first commercial field
Bob Gurnsey forms NSG, secures exclusive distribution of Nelson paintballs, sells equipment kits, and begins licensing fields. The first commercial field opens in Sutton, New Hampshire.
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1983
The first national championship
NSG stages a national championship with a $14,000 prize — paintball's first significant tournament purse.
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Mid–late 1980s
Constant air and semi-automatic
Marker design moves past disposable 12 gram cartridges to refillable constant-air systems, and from pump action to semi-automatic operation. Rates of fire climb sharply.
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1989
Paintball goes international
The British Paintball League is founded in Essex, England — one of the first national leagues outside North America, and a marker of how fast the sport crossed borders.
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1990s
The golden age
Semi-automatic markers and gravity-fed hoppers become standard. Tippmann's 68 Special and 98 Custom define the durable rental marker. The NPPL builds pro and amateur divisions. Fields open across Europe, Asia, and Australia.
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1995
ESPN broadcasts the World Cup
The first time a major television network carries paintball — the moment the sport stops being a local curiosity and becomes a spectator product.
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2000s
Electropneumatics and the speedball era
Electronically-controlled markers, force-feed hoppers, and inflatable bunker fields split the sport into fast tournament speedball and slower, tactical woodsball and scenario play.
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2010s–today
Refinement and a global footprint
Shaped First Strike projectiles and magazine-fed markers extend range and accuracy. Compressed air replaces CO₂ at the top level. Low-impact .50 caliber opens the sport to younger and casual players. Paintball is played in more than forty countries.
The golden age and the global sport
If the 1980s were paintball's proof of concept, the 1990s were its expansion. Several changes landed close together, and each one made the game faster.
Semi-automatic markers ended the pump era. A player no longer sacrificed a second of exposure to cycle the action between shots, which changed the geometry of every engagement on the field. Gravity-fed hoppers replaced ten-round tubes, taking capacity from a handful of shots to two hundred. Constant-air systems — larger refillable CO₂ tanks, and later compressed air — removed the 12-gram cartridge as a limit on how long a player could stay in a game.
The equipment industry consolidated around the companies that could build reliably at volume. Tippmann's 68 Special and, later, the 98 Custom became the definitional rental markers: rugged, simple to maintain, endlessly upgradeable, and forgiving of the abuse a commercial field inflicts. A generation of players learned the sport on a Tippmann.
Competition acquired structure. The National Professional Paintball League built out pro and amateur divisions and gave serious teams a circuit to compete on. And in 1995, ESPN broadcast the World Cup — the first major network coverage the sport had ever received, and a genuine inflection point for public perception.
Internationally, the pattern repeated with local variations. Britain had a national league by 1989. Fields opened across continental Europe, in Canada, Australia, across Asia and the Middle East. Regional leagues followed — and with them, national regulations that differ meaningfully from country to country on age limits, velocity caps, and what a marker is permitted to look like.
What the sport looks like now
Modern paintball is really three games sharing equipment. Speedball is played on a small symmetrical field of inflatable bunkers, with matches lasting a few minutes. Woodsball is the original form — natural terrain, larger areas, stealth and manoeuvre. Scenario paintball stages large, long-form games, sometimes running for days, built around a historical or fictional premise.
Sources & further reading
- The Nelson Paint Company — Nelson Paint History. Company founding (1940), Kingsford, Michigan, and the claim to the encapsulated washable paintball.
- Wikipedia — Paintball. The Henniker game of June 27, 1981; Hayes Noel and Charles Gaines; the four-quadrant flag format; G. Ritchie White's two-hour-fifteen-minute win; the 1983 NSG championship and $14,000 prize; velocity conventions and standard rules.
- Encyclopedia.com — Paintball. Charles and Evan Nelson; the Forest Service tree-marking problem; the horse-medication gelatin capsule; Nel-Spot advertising to cattle ranchers and accuracy at roughly 75 feet.
- Stock-Class Paintball Network — Nelson Paint Company's Nelspot "007". Marker specifications and production details.
- Shop Cousins — The history of the Nelspot 007. The Crosman 707, James Hale of Daisy, and the 1972 release.
- Paintball History — Bob Gurnsey and National Survival Games. The NSG franchise model, Nelson distribution contract, and equipment kits.
- WBUR, Only A Game — The Survival Game: The Story Of The First Recorded Paintball Match.
- Wikipedia — Tippmann. The 68 Special, 98 Custom, and the company's role in the 1990s.
Note: paintball's early history was documented informally, and some details — particularly around the exact sequence of Nelson's development work in the 1950s and 60s — vary between accounts. Where sources conflict, this site follows the most consistently corroborated version and says so.
How the ball itself changed
Oil-based enamel in a horse-pill capsule became a food-grade, water-soluble, biodegradable projectile. That transition is its own story.