Planet Eclipse HQ Blog

The final instalment of our Making Moves series brings Stoke Quest's 2020 CPPS season to a close. Did they manage to win Division 1 and earn promotion to Elite for 2021? Read on friends, read on. All good things must come to an end at some point even paintball; after a hectic year for UK paintball CPPS Round 3 would see the final event of the year for Quest. Going into the final event Quest currently sit 7 points clear at the top of Division 1 and would need to win just 2 of their games to be out of sight and win promotion to Elite for the 2021 season. The final event would only be 4 games for Quest due to the nature of the double round robin format, which had been introduced this season. That’s 4 chances to get their hands on the Golden Chalice / Holy Grail / Bleeding Goblets... etc.  The first game of the day saw Quest matchup against the only team that have managed to stop the momentum of Quest so far, the Planet Eclipse factory team Sandbaggers Black. Going into the day, it was...

Article #11 in the History of Planet Eclipse brings us to our factory team. The SandBaggers. To many teams and players around the world, the SandBaggers name will be very well known. To some, it'll be from having HUGE nights drinking with the team and regretting it for many, many weeks to follow. To others it will be because of memorable games on the field. And some will have been signed up to the team as they travel, to join in the fun. But to all, the SandBaggers is a very different Factory team, with a good heart at its core. A team that encourages, enables and supports players who can't play competitively any more because life got in the way or whatever. The SandBaggers represents the heart and soul of what it means to play paintball. To play as hard as you can, with the people you want to play with without the pressures or expectations of the modern game. Rock up. Have fun. Smash teams. Get smashed. Laugh. Go home. Make stories up. But for a deeper insi...

Article number 10 in our history of Planet Eclipse focuses on yet another office move. Yawn. Yeah, we know, not as exciting as talking about guns or tournament wins, but as boring as it may seem moving our HQ to something a little more sexy (and bigger) made a huge difference to how we operate day-to-day. When we first moved to Praed Road from our original location in Manchester city centre , we took 2 units and knocked them through to make one bigger unit. As we expanded and started production of our own Marker (the awesome EGO) we took on a 3rd and then 4th unit. Luckily all next to each other (in a U-shape) so we could continue to work, but the bigger we got the more disjointed it became. When we took on the 5th unit which was over the road–not so convenient–we decided to start looking for something else. After some searching we found a new build that was only ½ mile away from Praed Road that would allow us to design and build the Planet Eclipse HQ for our future. The ...

Ok, so Deansgate wasn't actually a conspiracy, we just wanted a cheeky title for the blog post. That said, there'll be a LOT of you guys out there who have never even heard of Deansgate before, so why don't you sit back, pour yourself a delicious beverage and settle in for some good old-fashioned story telling. Ledz, Speedy and Jules at the Paintball Planet Deansgate store. Picture the scene. It's 1991. It's Manchester (UK) and the paintball scene is booming and about to really go off. It's also the time when a humble paintball company called Planet Eclipse began to make waves. To hear the full story of how the band started, check out our 30 minute film 'Unemployables'  in which the guys talk about why and how they became Planet Eclipse. BUT, read this post first, obviously. We wanna talk about Deansgate. The place. We wanna know what it was like running a paintball store in a busy city centre location when paintball was going through it...

Planet Eclipse celebrates 25 Years In The Game, so we thought we'd share 25 key moments from those 25 years with you guys. Right here. On our blog. We managed to get the main men together and agree on a list of the 25 moments that we all agree stuck in our minds throughout our amazing 25 year journey. So each month we'll post a little story or two that will give you an insight into what we like and where we've actually been as a company, as paintballers and as people. So, strap yourselves in for #01. We thought we'd start our series of posts right at the very beginning. With our very first customer and our very first quid (fyi - a quid is one English pound in currency). The company was called Paintball Planet back then and we had a little shop on Deansgate Road in Manchester, UK. At the time (1991) paintball was full of weird and wonderful characters and I swear the shop saw all of them come through the doors. The shop was small and we tried to cram as much aweso...