Back in the mid eighties, before the craze really took off I was in a small group who were mostly military and a few off base civilians who spent way too much time and money on this. We had two competitions, standard capture the flag which in some ways probably led to my enjoyment of Doom so many years later and hit man. Hit man was simply that, everyone put their name in the hat and five bucks. Only rules were, you could not shoot someone in uniform or at work. Take the target name from your hit.

Lots of hilarity and some good bruises but those were mostly remedied by disallowing freezing the paint balls. Some really unsettling conversations with local and base police, paint ball guns can look like a gun in the dark and if you alter their color it can lead to problems. Most of us had that old standard green CO2 powered model whose name escapes me.

Speaking for myself, I never even took the hit man game as anything more than fun, we never had anyone freak out about losing. Most took pride in just not getting tagged by the next meeting and i think only once did someone take the pot, it usually ended up as that weeks pizza.

Laser tag was definitely not the same, the primary difference being it doesn't hurt if you screw up.