Networking our future
Greg Hastings might single handedly do more for the sport
of paintball than any circuit or any TV show. His vision? A
Tony Hawk-style paintball video game on the shelves before the
end of the year.
Greg Hastings, 37, Video Game
co-creator
How do you get into paintball?
This guy Louie, who I'm still best friends with, joined the
Navy. He invited me up for the weekend to see the area. But
we decided to add some fun... I don't even know what they called
it back then... Splat! That was 17 years ago.
You were hooked.
No! It scared the holy hell out of me. I spent the entire day
in this hole with a big bush over me. I felt like people could
hear my heart beating, 20 yards away. I ended up joining the
navy as well, when I was 21.
You went to college before?
Yeah I went to... I sucked at it. I went to two years of community
college, and I did terrible at it. Chasing girls, partying...
I had a good friend of mine who died in a pool accident. He
broke his neck right there in front of me. I gave him CPR and
tried to revive him. That's one of the reasons why I joined
the navy. He and I were total best friends, my other best friend
was already off, so I was down to one good friend, and he ended
up dying.
This was all in the suburbs of Philadelphia, but you
were stationed somewhere else.
I joined when I was 21, went to Bootcamp in Orlando, went to
submarine training school in Connecticut. Then I went to San
Diego for six months, and reported to my submarine in Connecticut.
I was stationed there for six years.
How often do you come back up?
Well, the longest I was submerged... I was on a fast attack
submarine. One of the smallest and oldest submarines in the
navy. Nuclear-powered submarine, that is.
So when you mean small, it's actually quite big.
It was 292 feet, 3 quarter inches... they made us remember all
that stuff. I went to Desert Storm. We did battle group protection,
followed all the air carriers. We did some extra stuff that
we can't really talk about.
What was the longest you were down there?
Sixty-two days submerged, but I was at sea for 10 and half months.
Not much paintball down there...
No, but I got a chance to play against Dave Youngblood when
I was stationed in California. That's when I started really
getting into it. I remembered that when I played the first time,
the adrenaline was just insane.
What were you specialized in?
I had two jobs, I was a navy diver and a sonar technician at
sea.
Why did you stop?
Desert Storm... I just got homesick, it's not that I have trouble
with authority, but I'm ambitious. It seems very weird, I was
a Navy diver on a fast-attack submarine in a war-zone, but that
wasn't fast-paced enough for me. I got honorably discharged
after my six years.
What do you do then, you head back home?
Yeah, I went back home. Moved in with another good friend of
mine. His mother was a private eye. I actually went to work
for this woman.
You're kidding me.
No, I went to work as a private detective. I'll show you my
ID if you want. I did that for about two years. We did insurance
frauds, marital cases, missing persons cases. Sometimes they
don't even tell us why they're looking for people. I took pictures,
impersonated people, try to call their friends, relatives...
Teaches you a lot of things, about how to get what
you want from people.
I kind of sucked at it. But my buddy was just an exceptional
liar.
You weren't that good of a liar?
No. My mom will be happy knowing that.
The reason why I stopped the navy is that I wanted to become
a police officer. While I was waiting to do that, I was on a
couple of lists. It's a natural progression, getting out of
the navy and becoming a cop. A lot of my friends had gone that
path, a lot of them are still cops today. But this paintball
thing came back again...
Haunting you?
Yes, my boss would let me go to tournaments and she would give
me jobs in between my tournaments. It was perfect, I was lucky.
Some of my teammates, they had to schedule weekends, I took
the time when I needed it. The single thing that changed my
life was me inventing my Comfort Pack.
This is while you were still on stakeouts?
Yes, I actually invented my pack while sitting on a case, watching
a house at 4 AM. I invented a lot of my products sitting there
being bored. I took a needle and thread and made my first pack.
Which was not the very first pack in paintball?
No, but it was the first with the comfort belt. We used to have
stupid straps with buckles.
You revolutionized the whole thing?
I'd like to think so.
You have a team at the time?
Yes, I was just playing amateur paintball. We would go to World
Cup, to Chicago, to Pittsburgh NPPL... The Amateur Open. I never
made anything on the West Coast.
Do you consider yourself a good player at the time...
Do you think that you are a good paintball player, period?
... I am an experienced player.
But in today's standards?
I'm still the front guy of a professional team, and I'm more
than twice as old as the youngest guy. I think that I'm pretty
darn good.
So you quit your Private Detective job to make a living
in the paintball industry?
I never thought paintball itself would allow me to make a living,
but the actual product that I invented... That's why I started
Redz. I talked to my brother, he didn't know anything about
manufacturing. Just got on the phone, started calling people.
My first products were actually made at the Henderson Aquatics,
NJ. One of the biggest wet suit manufacturers. I even outgrew
them. I started to get contacts overseas and I started really
small and I could never keep anything in stock.
Did you think that ten years later, the company would
still be around?
I got to the point where I could even do something else, and
started the video game. I am practically a full time video game
developer. An opportunity arose for me to sell my company, and
here I am, I was able to take a concept from nothing. Build
it up to one of the best product lines in the industry. The
only reason I say that is that there's publicly traded companies
out there duplicating my designs.
You never patented it?
I did.
Who did you sell it to, and why?
It worked out quite well, we didn't want to be partners anymore.
They felt like going in one direction, I had the team and the
video game...
You've been doing the video game for one year now.
It was playing Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer with Stephen Lashbrook.
We were taking a break. I couldn't believe we were playing that
game. I'm from Philadelphia, we don't know anything about surfing.
How does that sport make it to a video game? I'm from the industry,
I know the numbers, and I'm a gamer, I play FPS games. The light
went into my head. I'm the kind of guy who visualizes success.
When I think about something, for some reason, I can go straight
to the end. Within a couple of seconds, I saw my name on the
video game, and I saw that video game on the shelf.
The machine started working.
It all happened really quickly. I got on the phone with the
West Coast, Scott Talcott, his brother and family owned paintball.com.
He kept asking me how he could help me grow my company. Finally,
for some reason, he was the first guy who I thought about. I
told him that I was coming the next day to start a video game.
He had no experience in that realm, but I knew that he was the
right guy for this venture. He told me that this was a 10,000
in one chance. I still booked the flight. The next morning,
he went to work, talked about my crazy project. That night,
his partner had a drink in a bar mingling to some people. In
that circle, there was a video-game developer. I landed in Seattle,
and there was a coffee meeting already scheduled. I have now
flown back and forth 25 times to meet with this company called
WXP (the Whole Experience).
They picked up the game?
I partnered up with these guys because they have great experience.
They did Lord of the Rings. They did the one that followed the
book. They did stuff for Disney... They've been working on my
game for a year.
What stage is the game in right now?
We have just about mastered the online playability (multiplayer).
Release date?
November, and X Box will be releasing it.
Who will be distributing it?
That is still confidential out of today. A lot of publishers
came to us and not the other way around.
Do you think that this video game could do more for
the sport than a television deal?
Either the NXL or the NPPL on Fox? I think that the TV public
right now is not ready to fully accept our sport. You can see
it now with the paintball commercials you see on TV. It's building,
but you can still see how cheesy it is, nobody's ready to dive
into it. I think the moms and dads still need to be desensitized.
A paintball video game literally could gracefully do that. It's
going to be rated 'E' for everyone.
What Tony Hawk did for skateboarding, no television
could do... Do you see the NXL succeeding for example, people
watching Los Angeles against Miami on TV?
It's extremely premature, I think that you can't force that.
You need to have a vacuum that sucks it up. You can't force
feed that sort of thing to people.
What kind of fields are you having in the video game?
You're probably not allowed to have X-Ball fields... We don't
need to duplicate anybody's field, we're going to have close
to 200 fields. The online part will let you download thousands
of fields. You're going to have a single player mode. And you
start off as a kid. You get to go play paintball for the first
time, you get your orientation, your rental gun, and you have
to play on this field, get through the levels and eventually
make friends. You form a 3-man... You get a calendar, you have
to make more money, you get to create and evolve your characters...
You'll graduate to 5-man, maybe go to Europe. It spans over
a two-year period.
Yes, but when you go to Europe, do you go on the Millennium
circuit?
You get to go to France, to Portugal, to London...
What I'm trying to get at is that it's going to be
a huge advertising prospect. Obviously you know this,
have you already taken people on board?
Oh yeah... major brands.
This game will have the top recognized paintball faces and as
early as last week, we signed with Worr Games Products...
But for example, air fields, which logos will you be
using?
It depends on the sponsorship placement. It's ongoing... it's
a world within a world. If you can imagine it, one of our advertisers
wanted his logo sky rocketing over the field. That's possible.
But for things like circuits, will you be using names like the
PSP, Millennium, NPPL? We're talking to them, we'd like to have
them join, but it's strictly business at this level, and hopefully
guys like that can recognize what this game can do for them.
Last part. The people you signed, some of the biggest
names in paintball.
I signed about 30 players.
Jerry Braun read their contracts, and said that they
basically signed their lives away, and they would never get
a dime off it. What's your take on this?
Without getting into detail... This is an opportunity for the
players that I selected to be the faces of our sport, and no
league or no television deal, or no clown-suit, will give them
more coverage than what this game will provide them with. They
are being compensated. They have the right to decorate themselves
from the top of their hair to the bottom of their feet, I have
no control over that. They own themselves.
Virtual sponsorship.
You put a value on Chris Lasoya's gun. You put a value on that.
Am I paying Chris lasoya? You better believe it. How much will
it take to put a goggle on Alex Fraige? Is that a value? Absolutely.
Are they going to make a lot of money on game one? I don't know...
But you're already working on game 2.
And game 3, 4, 5... We're commencing a paintball franchise.
Just like the Tony Hawk Series. It's not about me... These players
as a team are going to help the public come into our world.
Something you love/Something you hate?
I love my fiance, Renee. And I hate haters.
One last thing, what's the game's name?
Greg Hastings' Pro paintball 2005.
So you're the smartest of them all...
That's the working title. Pretty damn proud of it.
INSER:
"I actually invented my pack while sitting on a case, watching
a house at 4 AM. I invented a lot of my products sitting there
being bored. I took a needle and thread and made my first pack."
"I think that the TV public right now is not ready to fully
accept our sport."
"This is an opportunity for the players that I selected
to be the faces of our sport, and no league or no television
deal, or no clown-suit, will give them more coverage than what
this game will provide them with."
Comments
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| "This gives alot of the info about the game this rock's i want the game now really bad can you give me one plez.....god im in love with it......... :)" | tony{p8baller}
20/09/04 at 16:57
 | | "This game is gonna rock so hard. I saw screenshots of it on action village's site, and it looks great. Too bad its not comin out for another 2 months tho." | archangel21
21/09/04 at 10:34
| | "Now I need to go out and buy an X-Box. This is going to be a HUGE step in the right direction, except for the cheat meter, but I can forgive it. " | ringldr21
23/09/04 at 17:06
| | "I want an XBOX too.... now we can play all the week and try to do what we did in the game on the week-end!! :D" | cuatzzint
24/09/04 at 18:05
 | | "I am reserving this game for sure! right when i got word of this game i bought an xbox. also if you look carfully at the box you can see that it is published by activision." | element503
27/09/04 at 19:32
| | "this guy in awsome, not only is he a great paintball player but he has made a vedio game that will promote paintball and really help the sport" | unseenfury22
07/11/04 at 15:18
| | "This game and guy is awesome. And i wanna give a shout out to everyone who helped make this game. IT IS AWESOME!!!" | paintballgirl2009
15/12/04 at 12:16
| | "if i doesn't come out for Platstaion 2 some heads are going to roll.." | boomer
29/12/04 at 16:16
 | | "this is a sweet game.....when i first heard about it i wasnt sure how they were gonna do the shooting for the electros but they did it....i am impressed with it...i love the snap shooting in this game its very well done....the only things i wish you could do in this game is to maybe be able to jumb over snakes, but i can live with out that, and i wish it was multiplayer not just online bust normal multiplayer where you can jsut play with your buddies with no hassle....that would have been aweosme... but overall this is a sweet game. i hope there are more games to come." | sharpy
31/12/04 at 17:39
| | "i got the game played it beat and it some more on live 2 words kick ass" | masterhitman
24/02/05 at 20:00
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