Paintball Net Revival!

After nearly 2 decades, Paintball Net is back!

Play paintball online! Go head to head against players from around the world! Paint each other pink and cyan! Mark up the simple-minded bots so the machines learn who’s boss! Paint the trees, the grass, and the sides of mountains! All without stinging welts, steaming masks, and poison ivy!

Multiplayer, online, and pain free. What more do you want???

Do you want to play in PVP “battle royales”? Do you want survival games, team games, and more? Do you want to modify your equipment so it fits your style? Do you want sci-fi equipment like infrared scanners and Predator-like refracto suits? Paintball Net has all of that!

Plus, Paintball Net has always been as much a community as a game. So don’t be intimidated by experienced players. Ask questions. Hang out. Make friends. Then paint them funny colors! =)

Originally online from 1996-2000, Paintball Net’s 2D PVP experience predates Google! Windows 95 was still new! I had hair! If you’re looking for a retro-MMO game, Paintball Net has serious 90’s cred. 🙂

If you played back then, there have been some changes–for example, PBTerm has been replaced with your browser–but at its core, Paintball Net is the game you remember!

-DavidRM

Play Paintball Net

Click Here to Play!

You can play Paintball Net with just about any browser on any device you care to pick up.

Paintball Net is FREE to play for as long as you like. It was then, it is now. And, yeah, now, just like then, you can definitely buy some advantages. =)

Paintball Net Tutorials

The Very Basics:

  • Left-click to move. Right-click to shoot.
  • Grass is fast. Forests aren’t. Mountains and water are slooooow.

The Very Basics for Mobile:

  • Touch your player icon on the map and “push”/swipe to move to a new location.
  • Touch the map (or touch targets) to fire.
  • Touch the map and do a swipe to move the visible area.
  • Mountains and water are still very slow.

Getting Started

Creating an Account – All you need is an email address and a clever player handle.

The Basics – Look around, get comfortable, prepare for battle.

Your First Game -If it moves, shoot it!

Additional Topics

Ways to Move

How to Play Paintball Net at Work

A Short History of Paintball Net

Back in 1996, my brother “Dug” created what he called an “action MUD” based on the multi-user dungeons popular in the 80’s and 90’s. He named it “Paintball Net” (PBN for short).

Paintball Net used ANSI text terminal commands to create a combined roll-and-scroll and animated text experience. ! (exclamation points) were trees, _ (underscores) were grass, ^ (up carets) were mountains, and more. Your “avatar” was a  “Y” (uppercase y) and enemies were * (asterisks). You used MUD-like commands to move around the world and target your paintball gun and buy and sell and more. I wish I had a screenshot of what the first version looked like, but you’ll just have to imagine. 🙂

Dug asked me, DavidRM, to create the GUI for the game. That was 1996, and I had just purchased Delphi 2 and wrapped up my first “learn Delphi” project. Paintball Net sounded like a good next step, and “PBTerm” was born. I *do* have screenshots of that.

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Oh, yeah. Love those 16-color Windows graphics. 😉

During the years it was online, the game evolved and upgraded to look more like this (with new artwork by Lars Ricaldi):

NewPBTScrn03.gif.61141c4bf631e1f27ec1e7d9f2eed45f.gif

We were never going to win any awards for our graphics, but we had a very devoted player community. 🙂

Paintball Net was online from the summer of 1996 through the summer of 2000, when we took it offline to focus on other projects. The game was never huge, but we had thousands of players come through over that period. And since then, every year at least a few of the players have reached out and asked/begged/pleaded/demanded that we put it back online.

And here we are. Well, here I am. Dug decided to sit out the revival, but I’m here. And he’s kinda here in spirit (he designed the game, after all).

Now Paintball Net is played in your browser–just about any browser on any device you care to pick up and point at it, and there have been a few changes/improvements–but it’s still pretty much the game we put online in 1996.

If you played the game in the 90’s: Welcome back!

If you’re a new player: Enjoy the game!

-DavidRM

Click Here to Play!

Archive (even more history!)