Tippmann SMG 60

This is in my series on Paintball guns.  You can find the introduction here.

The Tippmann SMG60 was a revolutionary marker.  It was created by Tippmann Pneumatics in the early '80s, and was "the first" in several areas.  It was the first semi-automatic paintball marker (meaning it fired one shot every time you pulled the trigger, instead of having to re-cock it every time you shot).  It was the first fully-automatic paintball marker (meaning that it would continue cycling and firing as long as you held the trigger down). It was the first paintball marker banned from tournament play (for the aforementioned reasons).
The SMG60 is either extremely awesome or extremely horrible, depending on how you look at it.  It looks like a REAL German sub-machine gun (smg) and this is potentially a problem with "public image," but like the NelSpot, there is something "just not right" about how it looks; there is just something about it that doesn't look like a real firearm, so its negative effect is debatable.
The SMG60 uses four-round "clips" to hold the 60-caliber paintballs.  These are convenient, in that all you have to do is shove them into the receiver of the gun and they continue into the "stick magazine" until they are ready to be shot.  They are also extremely inconvenient, because you have to remember where you fired and where they dropped out of the gun so you can go back and collect them.  The marker will not fire a paintball that is not in one of these clips, so keeping track of them is essential.

Overall, this marker was a dud.  It was too far ahead of its time, and "unbalanced" the game too much to survive.  It was just too technologically advanced to make it, because people were afraid of what it could do to their precious game.  Nowadays, it would be a huge success, because the "trend" is towards more realistic markers, and the modern "closed" field would allow for easy location and pick-up of the spent clips.