Dawn

IAO 2005 Dates and Sports Illustrated Update

Sports Illustrated will have a wonderful feature story on paintball and the IAO scheduled to be on the newsstands December 2nd. Charles Gaines, one of the founders of paintball wrote an entertaining story on the fun he had both inside an airfield as well as shooting it up in the woods scenario game.

According to Debra Dion Krischke, event producer, This story goes from the beginning days of paintball when there was just one company The National Survival Game, to Charles experiencing the many different facets of paintball 23 years later. Needless to say he was impressed with the technology, the people he got to interview, and his play time both in a tank during the scenario game and up close and personal in speedball.

The 2005 International Amateur Open and Paintball Festival is slated for July 27-31^st in Pittsburgh, PA. Gearing up to celebrate its 15^th Anniversary the ideas on the drawing board are already underway!

Look for the Dead Box Media DVD of the IAO Festival to be in the stores and pro-shops before Christmas!

Stay tuned to the website www.TeamEffortEvents.com for details!

So I’ve hi-jacked my husband’s website, but only because I have some really cool news to share.

Paintball Sports magazine’s October issue, available now, is providing some of the most extensive tank coverage in any magazine to-date. We have 8 pages of photos and info on everything from building tanks to disabling them. The article is written by one of the world’s foremost tank experts (and webmaster and owner of this site!) although he will tell you it was more of a joint effort. I told him it was practice for collaborating on our book together.

In the article, titled, Moving Props: A Look at Tanks in Scenario Games, you’ll find photos of Weltman’s Automagnus, the Blue Falcon, Bill Tison’s Hellfire, the Assassin’s Guild’s Buzzkill, Postal Persuasion, and many others. If we missed you this time around¼ my apologies! There were just too many tanks and only so many pages of coverage. Due to space constraints, the Armored Fist Panther didn’t even make the cut, so no one can say we were playing favorites.

If you have a cool-looking tank, we’ll try to catch you at the next event. I also have a habit of putting tanks in the magazine if they go up against one of the Armored Fist tanks¼ so shoot Nerfs at us, and I’ll ask TJ to shoot you (with a camera.)

The October issue (with Bea Youngs on the cover) is available now at paintball stores, fields, Borders bookstores, CVS, 7-11 and lots of other places. You can also subscribe online at www.paintballsportsmag.com. And yes, I know the website needs updating. We are working on it. We wanted to focus first on creating the best print publication possible, and a website to match will follow shortly.

Greetings!

We are giving our favorite Paintball Sports writers the opportunity to pitch their Scenario Concepts to us, for inclusion in an article. This is a NON-paying gig--we just want your wackiest ideas for scenario themes. We're going to put them all together in an article for an upcoming issue, and hope that one out of the 10 or so ideas we print will get picked up by a producer. Don't worry about style of writing, grammar, etc. Just jot your ideas down--we'll do the 'writing.' You can add suggestions for generals, characters, props, tanks, missions, if you want. Or we'll make it up once we get the basic idea from you. We'll alter the names, etc., (just as scenario producers do) in order to avoid copyright infringement.

Remember, this is all for fun. If you've ever said, "They should do a game based on..." then here's your chance to share it with our 120,000 readers (who just happen to include Wayne Dollack, Pacman and Mother, and Kitty and Spiro!)

We will consider all ideas submitted over the next two weeks and run the article in a future issue.

Dawn Allcot

Editor

Paintball Sports