Autococker
The Autococker is a closed-bolt semiautomatic paintball marker manufactured by Worr Game Products (WGP). It was one of the first paintball markers to be designed specifically for the sport, and has long been known throughout the paintball community for its popularity and customizability as well as its complexity. It is commonly believed that the closed-bolt design of the marker makes it inherently more accurate than its open-bolt counterparts, though this is disputed (see Accuracy, below). Once a common sight at professional paintball tournaments (especially in the early- to mid-1990s), its popularity has since waned with the rise in popularity of electropneumatic markers. History In late 1986, Bud Orr created the original Sniper pump marker by carving the works of a standard Sheridan PGP into an aluminum block that would accept a longer barrel. The Sniper was operated in a manner similar to pump-action shotguns in that it had to be manually recocked after each shot to load the next round. In 1987, Orr founded Worr Game Products to sell the products he was developing, and by 1988 he was running the business full-time. In order to stay competitive with the rising popularity of semiautomatic markers in the late 1980s, Orr added a pneumatic system onto the Sniper. The pneumatics automatically re-cocked the marker after each shot, and in 1989 the Autococker was born. There is a lot of controversy as to whether the design was stolen from Glenn Palmer (who has repeatedly and publicly made and defended this claim and has given a detailed accounting of the circumstances) or was actually Bud's innovation. In the early 1990s the Autococker quickly rose to become one of the most popular markers used by top professional teams, used by such teams as Bob Long's original Ironmen. Although heavily criticized for reliability and a number of design defects, it proved to be an easy platform to work off and aftermarket parts soon appeared shortly after its inception. One of the most fundamental and important upgrades was the Palmer "Rock" low pressure regulator (LPR) to replace the troublesome stock LPR. With a variety of options appearing for parts, Belsales in the UK became the first company to build WGP-certified aftermarket cockers, called "Evolution" in 1993. Throughout the remainder of the 1990s, dozens of shops ranging from large notables such as Dave Youngblood Enterprises (Dye), Shocktech, Planet Eclipse, Belsales and FreeFlow down to small one man pro-shop operations made a business of servicing and customizing Autocockers with price tags of nearly $2000 for high-end models. A combination of performance, upgradeability and cosmetic options made it one of the top tournament markers of the 90's. Only the Automag rivaled it in popularity until electronic markers appeared. Indeed, the autococker was so ubiquitous that its barrel threading became one of the most commonly used standards on high-end markers (akin to how firearm cartridge sizes are often named for the first popular gun model or manufacturer to use them). To this day, most high-end markers, and many entry-level as