This March 8th marks the 20th anniversary of the first magazine published by our very own John Amodea. In March of 1992 John released the first issue of Paintball Consumer Reports International (PCRI) and he’s been publishing paintball magazines ever since. “The thing I’m most proud of is in those 20 years, or 240 months, I’ve published 255 issues. I think there’s been only two months that I’ve not produced a magazine in that 20-year span. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing than this.”
When the first issue of PCRI was released on March 8, 1992 it was industry-changing. It was the first paintball magazine that looked at the industry and the game with a critical eye. At a time when there were unsafe products, scam-artists and fraudulent associations/organizations in paintball, PCRI was the first to bring these issues to light. PCRI’s “four star rating system” became the measuring stick for the quality of a product, company or organization in paintball. This measuring stick caused safety to be a large part of paintball. Many insiders have said that they doubt this would have happened if it hadn’t been for PCRI.
After selling PCRI in 1997 John took the editor’s position at Paintball Consumer Guide, the sister publication ofAction Pursuit Games. John then spent the next eight years as the editor of Paintball 2Xtremes Magazine before starting his own new publication, PaintballX3 ,in 2009. PaintballX3 and PaintballX3 Euro magazines are currently the most read paintball publications in the world.
The Sterling STP was my first paintball marker. Now I feel old.
looks cool 😉
That’s awesome and congratulations John. I know I go as far back as 1994-1995 time frame with reading PCRI so I guess I didn’t miss the beginning by much.