OLD... BUT STILL (VERY) BOLD!

NOVEMBER 2024 MARKS A BIG AIRSOFT-RELATED LANDMARK FOR OUR CURRENT EDITORIAL DIRECTOR BILL AS IT MARKS 30 YEARS SINCE HE FIRST PICKED UP AN AEG AND STARTED SENDING FULL-AUTO, HOP-ASSISTED BBS DOWNRANGE, SO WE THOUGHT IT WAS TIME FOR HIM TO LOOK BACK ON HIS AIRSOFT ADVENTURES, THE HIGHS AND THE LOWS, AND TO BENCHMARK THE CHANGES THAT HE’S SEEN!

Yup, it’s true! I really am, officially, one of the “Old and Bold”! Turning the big SIX-OH earlier this year I’m somewhat amazed and slightly bemused as to how I’ve ended up where I am… running a multi-award-winning and internationally recognised airsoft magazine and daily news site that is now my life, pure and simple!

If you’d asked me in 1994 when I got my firstever AEG (yes, a TM FAMAS haha!) if I thought this is where things would lead, and that the majority of my daily work would take place “digitally” I’d have scratched my head a bit… no, make that A LOT!

Let’s spool back in time to 30 years ago… like many of you “oldsters” reading this my first exposure to airsoft was when my local model shop got in some plastic pistol kits that actually shot little plastic BBs, and of course I NEEDED one!

This got put away and lost in time, but then in the early 90’s ready-made plastic BB pistols started appearing again in my local surplus store… the early 90’s weren’t a good time for me personally, as I’d finally at my family’s urging left behind further education and all the associated sports and outdoor pursuits shenanigans which I loved and got a “proper job and life”, one that had me behind a desk most of the day… wearing a suit!

Weekends were largely taken up with rock climbing, mountaineering, mountain biking, shooting, and generally hanging out with my old mates from school and college, some of which after the many years we’d spent in the Army Cadets together had joined “the Regs”. For various reasons, after school I’d decided to head off climbing and skiing in Europe, which turned into a year or so of the same, and although I had a brief dalliance with the “Ruperts of the OTC” later I decided not join up myself.

As we all hit our late 20’s though many of us were missing that rare thing that we all try to find… freedom and comradeship and we’d meet at the weekends… so when I turned up one day at my mate’s farm with a plastic, BB-chucking 1911 everyone had to have one… and things escalated from there!

The real turning point for some of us was when one of the lads somehow discovered “electric guns” from Japan, and he bravely set off who-knows-where (Reading I recall) to secure us some… and that, dear airsoft friends, is how in November 1994 I ended up with a wibbly-wobbly, creaky-bendy FAMAS AEG replica from some mythical outfit called Tokyo Marui!

Fast forward now a bit to the late 90’s and some of us were playing more regularly, largely still on the farm, but sometimes venturing further afield. Sites were becoming more of a thing, and some of these even advertised in the shooting press so that we could actually find them… games grew in size, and sometimes you even got more than twenty or thirty players at game! If you look back on arniesairsoft. co.uk (once the UK font of all airsoft knowledge!) you’ll find a short piece in their “what is airsoft” archive that states: “...now in mid 2000AD, there are well over twenty playing sites in the mainland UK alone, and more planned”… ah, so much choice!

But although technology was changing (full metal replicas anyone… yes bloody please!) the basic skirmish game remained the same, and we loved it! In 1997 I was heading towards jacking the “day job” and going back to outdoor pursuits full time so I got myself an AOL email address, as did many of my friends, and suddenly we could use our home phone lines to “get online” with much buzzing, whistling and clanking… and we started to see “Airsoft Forums” that told us more about airsoft, more about the AEGs that we could buy, and more about games we could go to… it was a revelation.

However, although some of my fellow “Old and Bold” you may encounter at your local site today will go all misty-eyed and say things like “Ah, we should bring the forums back!” I’m gonna tell you right now that these could be insanely toxic places, making

“IT’S TRUE! I REALLY AM, OFFICIALLY, ONE OF THE “OLD AND BOLD”! TURNING THE BIG SIX-OH EARLIER THIS YEAR I’M SOMEWHAT AMAZED AND SLIGHTLY BEMUSED AS TO HOW I’VE ENDED UP WHERE I AM… RUNNING A MULTI-AWARD-WINNING AIRSOFT MAGAZINE AND DAILY NEWS SITE THAT IS NOW MY LIFE, PURE AND SIMPLE!” current-day social media look positively tame in comparison! You didn’t venture there unless you were a brave little airsofter…

THE Y2K BUG!

So pushing on past “Y2K”, and by that time all of us with the “airsoft bug” were “online”, and as ‘00 became ’01 amazingly the internet had not crashed and the world, and airsoft, trundled on as ever.

Sites and games were far more widespread, and access to both kit and airsoft platforms got better and better; choice grew, communication was faster, and the airsoft forums thrived! Although the forums grew increasingly unpleasant as new players got online and the then “Old and Bold” retaliated badly to their whipper-snapper peevishness, these were really “halcyon days” for airsoft, and although most of us had decent jobs that paid good money increasingly we were drawn deeper into the airsoft world, spending said money on increasingly more complex AEGs, accessories, and gear, playing more regularly again and building our own personal kit lockers and armouries!

After a somewhat mad start to the new millennium my life had settled again; I had a new partner (soon to be my second, very understanding wife), I was back to working in the outdoor pursuits world I loved so much with one of the best outdoor performance brands out there, had a new home in a new area, and got to play airsoft at least once a month! Then in 2006 came the chance to live and work the USA, and we leapt at it!

Sadly due to the moving companies not understanding “airsoft” but seeing “guns” I ended up selling off all my airsoft replicas and heading to “the new world” with a bunch of cash in my pocket, which I used over time to start my collection all over again!

Arriving in Florida I was by then self-employed and only came back to the UK a couple of times a year to fulfil contractual obligations… even back then I largely worked “online and remotely” from my new home in Clearwater…

Which of course meant more time playing airsoft with the new friends I soon made; Jay, Scott (Santa), Kyle, Jim C, Jimmy, Luke, Don, and eventually Robbie when he moved down from Virginia. My time in the USA also meant I got to shoot “real”… a lot! This was both in formal training sessions with some righteous instructors and in informal range sessions with mates but suffice to say I put a LOT of lead downrange in four years, and it illustrated to me just how close to the “real” look and feel some of our airsoft replicas truly are!

Again, long story short…

As major airsoft games in Florida at that time were “18 and up” we discovered that many of the youngsters were playing weekend pickup games wherever they could, in some cases in places where they really shouldn’t have been! Hooking up with a couple of paintball fields in the area Jay and I (with the kind guidance of my old mate John “Lionclaws” Lu) started running airsoft games, and our little airsoft business, “OC-16”, flourished… these were very good times indeed and I like to think that the “OC-16 Tan Hats” introduced many young players to the game properly, something that I’m proud of to this day. All of our games were largely organised online by now, with regular email updates and by this time, social media posts to our “database” of regulars.

I was playing at least twice a week, at the weekend in the woods, and midweek evenings “under the lights CQB”! AEGs got better and more reliable. Access to kit, even airsoft-specific kit, got easier. Games got bigger, and once where it would be a handful of players, now even simple weekend skirmish games were reaching triple figures, and games taking place on genuine Military sites attracted even bigger numbers. It was during this time I started writing about bigger airsoft games in the USA, not for AIRSOFT ACTION, but for other publications, and again to keep things brief this soon became a major part of my working life, along with also writing for a military-themed magazine.

Returning to the UK after those four years I continued down the writing path, though it taught me, through a lot of personal pain, anguish, and what today would be described as “attacks on my mental health”, how NOT to run ANY magazine, let alone one that was for passionate airsoft enthusiasts!

Things came to a head when I was dumped on from a great height, and I was on the cusp of giving up airsoft writing, and even airsoft itself after this mind-numbingly unpleasant experience… then one morning the phone rang, and a very special man and Editor of one of the UKs biggest shooting magazines entered my world and asked me if I’d like to write about airsoft for him!

That man was the late, great Pat Farey of Gun Mart, who over the sadly few short years that I knew him became a friend, confidante, and a true journalistic mentor. He was a passionate believer in shooting sports as a whole including airsoft, and taught me to create better, more informative articles and about the business of how magazines actually work, and work well! I will forever be in his debt for the wonderful new vistas he opened up to me, and the advice that I will forever cherish both professional and personal. I hope Pat would look at what I do now and say “Good job young man, carry on… be sure to get your copy in on time!”.

Back in the airsoft world fully again as a freelance I also approached Nige and AIRSOFT ACTION to see if anything I wrote would be of interest, and very quickly a solid friendship developed.

Again, fast-forward to now, and here were are… after working with Nige on a couple of successful publications I was tasked to take AIRSOFT ACTION fully digital in March 2020 and champion our “Free to Read” format so that we could share “our kind of airsoft” to even more players globally. When it came time for him to take a step back, it was time for me (even though I was fighting cancer at the time) to step up, and with such a great “AA Crew” fully alongside me we have forged even further ahead… and I, and we, haven’t stopped yet!

Unanswerable Questions

So onto some observations…

Over my many years “in the game” many nonairsofting friends have asked me “What is airsoft?”; is it a game, a sport, a hobby, or a passion and I have to say that it is all of those things… and far more as to me as you will have seen; it is a lifestyle choice.

The same question could be asked in a different way, as in “What is an airsofter?” and the answer I would give you after thirty years of being involved is that no two airsofters are alike. Some may be “lone wolves” who just love going out and being challenged both mentally and physically, whilst some belong to a team and jointly enjoying a particular way of playing, but even amongst those some will “play team” and that’s it whilst other may “play team” and at the same time enjoy other styles of airsoft.

And “styles of airsoft”… there’s a thing in itself! Skirmishing... FilmSim... BattleSim... MilSim... Speedsoft... Historical Airsoft... Practical Shooting… I could go on as the forms are both myriad and evolving further. While some will doggedly (and rather pig-headedly) defend one specific and particular “discipline” as being “the one”, others like myself will look at what’s on offer and in many cases think “I’ll give that a go”, and our airsoft world is by far the richer for those players that, like our beloved game, continue to grow and evolve.

Wherever we may differ though there is one thing that brings us together as a global family, and that’s our ownership and passion for AEGs and GBBs!

Whatever your particular favourite “discipline” may be, we all need something that spits BBs, be that a specific replica of a real-world firearm or simply something that shoots reliably, accurately, and consistently of our own creation; in truth, for me, it has always been about “da gunz”!

Generative Ai

Bizarrely, as someone that earns his meagre crust from writing, I genuinely have no problem with the adoption of AI for many reasons, as advances in so many fields that benefit us as humans are being touched positively. I also don’t have an issue with AI being used to generate images and even text… as long as it is made clear that AI is being used.

An artist creating a beautiful picture with charcoal sticks will tell you that they used “charcoal #4” to do so, and a writer will create fabulous worlds from their imagination alone… an AI can do both in a way, and intrinsically the part of AI I’m most interested in is the “I”, the intelligence aspect which indicates that this artificial construct has the ability to learn and grow.

This does not scare me, there’s no “skynet moment” on the horizon as far as I can see, but the learning process will no doubt be greatly accelerated; however, as I write about having 30 years of airsoft experience, of shooting a massive amount of AEGs and GBBs, of skirmishing, engaging in MilSims and special games, and of interacting on a very, very personal level with so many players in so many countries over the years I would ask when, and indeed if, an AI will have this catalogue of direct, personal experience to pull from?

SOCIAL MEDIA, THE NOT-SO-TENDER TRAP

I admitted earlier in this article that I have never been averse to using social media, and in many ways it has been a great positive, allowing airsofters both locally and globally to speak and share their adventures and “technical intel” freely and easily. Game-runners can easily reach a far wider player-base for their events, and manufacturers, even small niche ones can keep us easily and swiftly appraised of all their new goodies!

But of course we have all learned that there is a far darker side to social media platforms; why… what is the narrative? Compulsion? Greed? Human nature at its worst?

Far from giving us the freedom to converse openly and across boundaries it appears that the social media platforms are setting their own horizons when it comes to free speech, even when it’s completely legal, but it’s ultimately “their ball, their rules”. Yes, as we know (and not just in airsoft terms) social media platforms have become echo-chambers for all manner of toxic “non-debate” and home to those who shout loudest, often with the least to say or at best an agenda of their own.

Influencers (again not limited to airsoft)… what do they gain and how? Essentially they are a hidden sales force for the products and services they “recommend”, and social media allows them to have their voice and flourish, gaining followers who aspire to a certain “lifestyle”. Sadly, apart from a few very good ones that I’m proud to count as personal friends (and in some cases work directly with) that provide solid in-depth analysis of new platforms and sound evaluation of new gear, plus first-rate event coverage, most “airsoft influencers” that have come and gone over the years have never appeared at any of the games I’ve ever been at, and if they have they’ve pranced around for an hour or so and then moved on… Airsofters? You decide…

Yes, as I said earlier too, forums… toxic as hell but now viewed through rose-tinted shooting glasses, and the forerunners of the vitriol I see spouted now on more “modern, progressive, and inclusive” social media platforms… “inclusive” to who… certainly not to airsofters, and most certainly not to businesses in the airsoft world.

Axe to grind? Me? No, not really to be honest as I’ve been more than happy NOT to reinstate the AIRSOFT ACTION Facebook page for instance, and it has not affected the numbers of you that flock in to read the magazine each month (thank you!)… In fact, as inherently lazy human beings (and yes, I do count myself amongst you!) we like to take an easy path in a complex world. So, after stating that AA was leaving Facebook, thousands more of you signed up to push notifications direct from www.airsoftaction.net (thank you again!).

I’d urge you all to remember that just like your AEG or GBB, social media is a tool that should allow you to enjoy yourself, not threaten or cajole you into doing something you’d rather not. In recent months I’ve curtailed not only what AIRSOFT ACTION says on these platforms, but in actual fact how much I interact with them personally… and I feel better for it! As I said, social media is a tool… YOU decide when and how best to use that tool…

CLOSING DOWN, MOVING ON!

To sum up, as you’ll have read here, airsoft has been a massively positive part of my day to day for over half my life. All the real-steel and airsoft training courses, along with running around in cold, dark buildings and muddy woods has kept me physically fit (even after illness), and I like to think writing for military, security, shooting, and especially airsoft publications has kept me mentally agile too. It’s a rare thing that for thirty years one particular thing in your life can keep you excited and passionate about it, but airsoft for me has 100% been “THAT THING”!

I’ve been privileged to have trained at home and abroad with some righteous, top-tier guys that have “been there, done that” for real, to have played airsoft in many countries, and travelled even further afield to report on airsoft events and international shows like IWA, SHOT, and DSEI, along with airsoftrelated and airsoft-for-training stories. Heading to Taiwan last year was a bit of a dream come true for me, thanks to G&G of course, but staying for a bit longer “on my own dime” with Stewbacca and Anny allowed me to visit a lot of places where airsoft innovation truly thrives… I don’t refer to Taiwan as “Airsoft Central” without good reason.

I’ve been lucky enough to shoot literally hundreds of airsoft replicas of real firearms (along with the “real steel” when at shows and on training trips overseas) from some fabulous manufacturers, along with their own unique designs, more of them than I ever thought possible and I do love my weekly rangetime! But ultimately, as I was reminded very recently, airsoft is all about where I started so many years ago… out in the woods, with a bunch of good mates with some “big bois toys”, ducking, diving, and slinging BBs at each other!

Whilst I have no doubt that those “weekend skirmishes” will carry on as ever, change is inevitable in all things, but thankfully in airsoft the growth of the game worldwide has been continuous and encouraging, and shows that the next 30 years should be totally positive if we can overcome the pitfalls of arguing with one another and act with a cohesive voice as a true part of the larger shooting sports world.

AIRSOFT ACTION still has a way to go, and that journey MUST include all of us that are involved in the magazine being active airsofters and shooters in one way or another! I don’t know if I have another thirty years left in me to be an “active player” on a regular basis again (that’s a sobering thought in itself!) but I do know that I will always get out to play a bit and shoot, real rounds and BBs both.

Airsoft has brought me so much joy and has made me so many fabulous friends around the world that it will be a part of my life until the day that I eventually leave for that big old Safe Zone in the sky… I just hope that I’ll be able to meet many, many more of you before I make THAT particular long walk! AA

“I LIKE TO THINK WRITING FOR MILITARY, SECURITY, SHOOTING, AND ESPECIALLY AIRSOFT PUBLICATIONS HAS KEPT ME MENTALLY AGILE TOO. IT’S A RARE THING THAT FOR THIRTY YEARS ONE PARTICULAR THING IN YOUR LIFE CAN KEEP YOU EXCITED AND PASSIONATE ABOUT IT, BUT AIRSOFT FOR ME HAS 100% BEEN “THAT THING”!”