Well, many of you will quite surely laugh just looking at the name of this article. You will most likely think: What the heck does this article concern me? Well, it might not, but if you want to hear about the sport of paintball and where it stands in Norway, you might take a look.

First I’m going to give you a short brief on Norway, climate etc. Norway is a little country located in northwestern part of Europe. The population is approx. 4 million people. Its a very cold climate and we’ve got long winters and short summers, in the northern part of Norway the temperature can drop below 40 C.
Despite the cold weather, some people keep playing in the winter.

Paintballs Start in Norway

It started out in the early eighties with the Splatmaster, people played in the many forests of Norway and there were no organized teams or fields. As time passsed by the sport progressed fast and soon the first semis were born and hit the marked. Markers such as the VM-68 and the Daystate Sam Patriot soon became player’s choice. Especially the Sam Patriot was suited for the Norwegian climate, because of its superb ability to handle low temperatures.
As the sport continued to grow, we got more shops, organized teams and fields. One of the reasons for this was the Internet, people started to create their own homepages and they used the chat facilities the Net offered. The result: players from all over the country could meet in one place. This meant a great deal for the sport and is one of the main reasons why paintball stands in the current position today. But offcourse the Internet can’t get all the credit. The most important reason for the ultra fast growth, were the devotion and effort put in by a few people. Through lots of hard work and sacrifice there were created more stores, fields, teams and arranged tournaments.

Facts

* Two of the biggest paintball stores in Norway are Sniper Paintball and Team +.
* The owner of Sniper Paintball is also a player on NBK, Norways best team.

NBK finished second in the “Mayhem Master World Championships” (England), and I guess that speaks for it self. We have about twenty more or less serious teams in Norway, teams from all over the country, but mainly in the eastern part. It’s in the four last years that painball have been witnessing a real “take-off” in Norway, and lately we got our first indoor fields. Since Norway is a little country with few or none paintball manufacturers, we have to import all of our gear. This means that the price jumps up in the sky. For Example we pay almost 100$ for a case of RP Scherer Euroflite and for a WGP Autococker’99, nearly 690$. This means that ordinary man can’t play very often, unless you have a sponsor. In the past years paintball have become more than just a “game” and have received good response, but the sport have also struggled a hard battle against false rumors, people who tend not to like paintball for no other reason than little knowledge of the sport, people who think it’s warfare and people who are playing on private ground without asking permission first. Theese problems seem to vanquish when people get the impression of what the sport really stands for. And isn’t that the main reason why things get blown up: Lack of knowledge due to what is really going on? And when people don’t know whats going on, rumors start to spread immediately.

I hope this article have been of interest, if not, look on the bright side: It only took a few minutes of your life : )

Petter Rogneby
MPN Columnist