Hmmm........let me see........ .....well tag started for me way back when I was playing fetch with my pet brontosaurous.....
....oh, okay....so I'm not THAT old yet...lol
Actually, my interest with Laser Tag started when I was in Boy Scouts and we used to play games like capture the flag... I got tired of the older scouts cheating and not being Tagged, when you tagged them......lol (so much for scouts honor)... Being into electronics I came up with a simple Op-Amp circuit that triggere an SCR to stay permanantly on when a flashlight swept across a Cds Cell, letting turning on a high pitch piezo speaker that required a electic key switch to turn it off......unfortunately no one else wanted to make the circuit (especially the older scouts for some reason). Looking back now I could kick myself for not trying to find an adult who might have been interested.....lol..
Fast forward 5 or 6 years....when I was in the Air Force, stationed at Carswell AFB mid to late 80's I got involved with a group in the dormatories there that played a game called Assasins. Understand that there are up to 250 or more people in a single dormatory, and generally you only knew about 5-10 of these individuals. The way the game was played is a central person called "THE BOSS" or "The Godfather" (depending on who was running the game), would assign you a person in the dormatory to take out. All you were given was their name and shop designation...you had to figure out who the individual was, track them down and take them out. Generally, at any given time you had 2 to 5 individuals that had been assigned to take you out. In the beggining of the game, you did this by handing the person a note that said "BOOM", and there were all kinds of rules and protocols. As the group of people playing grew, someone came up with the ide of using these guns that shot soft rubber pellets....which was alot of fun till people got automated ones and then all of a sudden there were those pellets all over the dorm. The dorm manager got frustrated and banned those guns......so we switched over to water guns....anyone remember the battery operated uzi's that shot 25-50 feet....well one weekend there was a big shoot out as multiple people had subcontracted other people in the game to help them take someone down and it turned into an all out level gang war.....it was a ton of fun till someone not in the game got hit....and went into their room and got a cup of water and hit someone else who was not involved who went and got a pitchure of water.....which in the end led to people comming out of community showers with trash cans full of water. Needless to say it took a week for the carpets to dry and for tempers to simmer...and water guns of any kind or make were banned from the dormatories. Finally someone noticed the original WoW Lazer Tag guns.....wooohooo! The games started up again, although this time with a MUCH smaller gathering. The Lazer Tag was great as it didn't leave any kind of amunition all over the dormatory to cause problems. The dorm manager even approved so much that I came home from work one day, opening the door to find an assasin waiting for me on the other side....had bribed the dorm manager to let him in my room I later found out. Unfortunately, one weekend, someomen got a Starlyte Pro and during a night game when we were all out on the hunt in and around the dorm, he went across the street and started sniping people from the post office. For whatever reason an MP squad car happend to drive by and see him in there with what looke like a rifle. I don't remember exactly what happened that night (I was at work when this went down), but the end result was that Laser Tag as well as the game assasins was banned at the dorms....and the fun ended.
Fast forward 16 years....I'm now an electronics engineer, I've worked for a production company that was just getting into designing Laser Tag arenas....although I had a falling out and left the company and committed career suicide by moving to the lovely state of Oregon for a job that turned out not to exist after I spent my last penny getting here.
I had alot of spare time on my hands while trying to land a job. I got back involved with scouts because of my at the time girlfriend's boys (she is now my wife). I found that scouts hadn't changed much in respect to the issue of I tagged you.....no you didn't problems with night games. So I went to the store and found some cheap Laser Challenge Special Edition guns and we turned the lights out at the house and flipped all the couches and tables on their side and had a blast. Needless to say...I was hooked again.
I decided to try and make my own circuit, so I got online to get some information and found out that Lazer Tag was alive and well.....and I also found out that there were about 10 other individuals out there that were working on circuits...so I thought.....why waste my time?
At the same time I had signed the lease on a website space for 4 years for my future wife hoping that she would be able to use it to create a home based business so she would have more time for the kids. Turned out that being an euntreprenuer (sp?) was not in her blood...so I had this website space that was costing me about $80 a month doing nothing.
Then it came to me...well if there are 10 people making gear....they are going to need a place to buy, sell and trade the stuff that they make.....and whala.........www.1SourceLaserTag.com was born.
Well, as the years have rolled by none of those people that said they were making a system ever did. So I attempted to turn 1SLT into an infomation source and sell part and pieces...then I dabbled with the big boys like Steradian and Styfle Manufactureing to get into the outdoor Laser Tag business......and got burned for about $7,000.00 .....became gun shy and turned back to the consumer / hobby market and decided to stop trying to make money and just treat the website as a hobby.....and started back on my line of Gear, FXonics. After filling one 20 sensor order, I decided (or rather my wife decided for me), that manufacturing gear was not worth the price that the general hobbiest could afford! And the purpose of 1SLT has been kind of waffling ever since...
Somewhere in there I got involved with the Seatle Laser Tag Club....Cathie and I drove up there on a stormy weekend and shanghied Laserbait into taking us on a tour of their clubs stomping grounds.......after seeing the forts......I just had to play a game! I paid a riddicullous price for a bunch of ESS gear so Cathie and I could get involved. We had so much fun with the Seattle Group...that I wanted to try and get things going a little more local...and the first Tag-Fest was born. I think about 15-16 people showed up for that game (90% of them from seattle). We all had a blast and got some great pictures...which Peter Montgomery saw. He contacted me or I him....don't remember now and he offered to bring Steradain gear if I wanted to do Tag-Fest again...and so we did it again. Using the Steradian gear was AWESOME! (thus me getting into trying to sell it there for awhile). Granted I still loved my ESS gear......but after you use their gear and feel the pulse, hear the sounds, see the muzzle flashes...and tag people at incredible ranges in full sunlight....it leaves you yearning for more! (triggered me to start on FXonics gear there for a bit)
Well somewhere in there one of the members from the Seattle area, Sinistrahd (never can spell that right...arg) started talking about this guy who was developing a new LazerTag gear.......and this new website popped up with some very funny looking guns.......although they were double barreled......rumors spread like wild fire...... Finally it was mentioned that the designer of this gear was going to come to one of the Bremerbattle games........BREMERBATTLE IV, we advertised it and all kinds of stuff. James had bought a bunch of the new gear and brought it to the game.....which looked like it was going to get rained out at first (thank god we brought the dinning fly!).
When we first got to try the gear, I was not at all impressed...to be honest I wanted to go back to the ESS gear. I couldn't seem to hit anyone....and there were so many different sounds I couldn't tell if I was shooting, being shot...or even if I was still alive for that matter. Then Brian showed up....TagFerret, and started explaining the gear, and did some hosted games.....I still couldn't hit anything, or tell what was going on....but I had fun none the less.
I'll be honest, at first I wanted to stick to ESS. I was just getting my electronics to work with ELS and mod my equipment......not to mention LaserBait had talked me into buying $500 worth of gear from this one guy.....so I had a bunch of guns now (although it turned out later that 70% of them didn't work - could kick myelf for not having spent that money on LTTO)...
But then we had another Bremmerbattle with ESS gear and there was alot of problems with faulty guns, guns that were better than other guns, and guns that seemed not to take hits, and others that seemed to take hits too easily..etc..etc... Also too, christmas happened and the LTTO ads on our website profited us over $600 in one quarter! Then there was a fort game where we started with ESS, then switched to LTTO.......and low and behold...I couldn't hit anything with my ESS gear, but was doing rather well with the LTTO gear (my aim had adjusted to the LTTO's off sites)...at that point I decided to drop ESS and go LTTO all the way. We bought about 40 guns to ensure we had enough gear for everyone at Tag-Fest. Add Habro's generous gifts to the games...we all had a blast. So I'm hooked...we now own mixe of deluxes and IRT-2X's, 120+ of them! We rent them out all over the U.S.
