Squirt-Gun Assassins

Posted by Miss Cellania in Everything Else on September 27, 2008 at 8:49 pm


This year’s StreetWars tournament is in full swing in New York City. It is a shadowy sport (previously at Neatorama) in which participants are directed to kill each other off -with squirt guns! Players are directed to find their “target” (another player) and eliminate them. Then they inherit their victim’s target.

StreetWars was created in 2004 by Franz Aliquo, then a 28-year-old securities lawyer, as a cure for a boredom phase he was working through. Mr. Aliquo named himself Supreme Commander and, with a friend known as Mustache Commander and other helpers, has held several killing tournaments in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London and Paris. The game resembles the 1980s campus phenomenon Assassin, itself a reminder of the 1985 film “Gotcha!” starring Anthony Edwards and his paintball gun.

The contestants are mostly in their 20s or early 30s, from what could be called the kickball set; about 35 percent in the current war are women. “We had a 76-year-old grandmother in San Francisco,” said Mr. Aliquo, who lives in Long Island City, Queens, and now is the events director at Thrillist.com, a Web site that distributes daily e-mailed lists of events in various cities. “She got two kills.”

250 participants began the tournament earlier this month; 16 now survive. Tomorrow, the sudden death round begins, where everyone tries to kill everyone else. Read about the adventures of various players in the New York Times. Link -via Digg

(image credit: David Golman/New York Times)




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COMMENT

8 comments to "Squirt-Gun Assassins"

  1. Wedgie
    September 27th, 2008 at 11:00 pm

    My heart races just thinking about the 2009 game… I am so down.

  2. Johnny Cat
    September 27th, 2008 at 11:42 pm

    I used to play the basic game, a la Gotcha! with paintballs and all.

  3. Lola
    September 28th, 2008 at 12:30 am

    This exact game was a tradition at my high school in Westchester County, right outside NYC. From 1997 at the very latest, (I’m not sure when exactly it started) we stalked each other before, between, and after classes with waterguns. A ton of fun, and you could win some cash at the end, if you got that far.

  4. Thomas
    September 28th, 2008 at 10:49 am

    Hell yea, that’s awesome. I might be getting in on a game of killer soon, if the group can get its collective ass together.

  5. Ali S.
    September 28th, 2008 at 4:51 pm

    Looks like fun, however, I can’t imagine how you have to explain to a Cop why you were carrying a water gun in the middle of the city spraying someone.

  6. sw
    September 29th, 2008 at 8:51 am

    if only my company was more laid back, this would be fantastic to play in the cubicle maze.

  7. renderanything
    September 29th, 2008 at 6:27 pm

    Anyone ever seen the movie Big Trouble? Near the beginning of the movie high school kids are playing an extremely similar game, down to using squirt guns. It was released in 2002.

  8. Brian
    September 29th, 2008 at 10:10 pm

    I used to run this exact game in high school. We called it killer (it was one of the first published live action rollplaying games I think). We also allowed for things like car bombs (toilet paper tubes taped to the bottem of the car), animal attacks (I had some one hide in a closet in a gorrila suite and jump out and “kill” the guy), and poisend food (usealy a few drops of food coloring). How these kills were verified is a longer post, but we got by.


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