My First (Proper!) AEG

WE MAY THINK THAT TIME GOES QUICKLY IN THE “AIRSOFT WORLD” BUT A NUMBER OF THE AA TEAM HAVE BEEN INVOLVED FOR LONG TIME! BILL KICKS OFF A NEW OCCASIONAL COLUMN FROM OUR CONTRIBUTORS, LOOKING AT HOW TIMES (AND THE GAME) HAVE CHANGED SINCE HE BOUGHT HIS FIRST “PROPER” AEG, THE MUCH-MALIGNED FAMAS FROM TOKYO MARUI!

Let me take you back to a gentler time, a time when airsoft was largely unknown (yes, fellow airsofters, that time did once actually exist). There was no social media, in fact, to even get email I needed to run a cable from my telephone socket up the stairs to my little office and then wait for series of weird buzzes, beeps, whirs and what sounded suspiciously like animal grunts to end, so that Windows 3.1 could do its thing and get me online …eventually.

My mobile telephone made calls and occasionally I might send a “text” which was very modern and efficient but to get anything on paper meant waiting for my Canon Fax machine to do its thing. Although it was all slow, I was there, I was “connected” and occasionally, if I had the time, I might visit a “forum” or two to learn about this thing called “airsoft”.

This was 1994, I’d just hit 30 (yes, I am THAT old!) and I was a successful young man who owned (read mortgaged to the hilt!) his own home and had a degree of disposable income.

Some mates and I had found some spring airsoft pistols in our local model store and before then we’d had the plastic model kits, both those that fired BBs and those from LS Models that were basically just a kit that operated like the real thing. From memory, one of the lads got himself a spring shotgun or rifle of some description and suddenly our own personal “arms race” had begun! We played on a mate’s farm, around the outbuildings, with safety glasses from the local builders merchant as “eyepro” and ​boy was it FUN!