What is the United Kingdom Laser-Tag Alliance?  The Laser-Tag Hobby Live Roleplaying Hobby has been in existence since the late  1980's and was "invented" by several different groups around the country.  Lazer-  Tag the toy had been released in 1986 by Mattel but had failed to catch on primarily  due to the high price of the kit you needed (£50 was a lot of pocket money back in  them days).  Despite a heavy marketing push including an animated series,  lunchbox's, gamebooks from TSR, etc., it never really took off in this country.  In  time the kit started to be sold off cheaper and cheaper and this is approximately  when the hobby was born when people started buying the surplus stock at knock  down prices and starting to play with it.  As time passed people started to tinker with the original equipment and analyse what it did, this started a homebrew industry of  initially new gun boards and later on new sensors. Other enhancements included  bettes lenses for the gun, Sensors with a programmable number of hits, etc.  In the early 1990's, a fanzine called Firefight was started to cater to this hobby (the  archive of which can be found here). The first TagCon was also held around this  time as well. Firefight lasted until 1999 before online media/discussion effectively  killed it but TagCon has continued to be held virtually every year since the first one.  It was at a TagCon that a set of unified rules/guidelines was first mooted, then  designed and finally ratified by the clubs that existed at the time and have changed  only very slightly (to allow for advances in technology) since then.  It was at a more  recent TagCon that the idea of the UKLTA was born, not a completely new idea, it  had previously been pushed forward on several occasions in different forms but had  never got past the first hurdle.  A constitution was drawn up and then ratified at the  following Dropzone. The primary goals of the UKLTA are to provide an insurance  policy for the hobby and the games run therein, to run Dropzone (the national  event).  www.firefight.org.uk (c) UKLTA 2011 / Made with Xara