I started with the original episode in 1996. Back then I discovered the game with a childhood love. Since we were eleven, very socially awkward and didn't know much etc, we didn't even kiss, but we did dance a little, and we played the beginning of the game together.
We managed to get past the first zombie after a few tries, yeah, the one who's eating Kenneth in the corridor, this good old "Let me take care of it!" thing. And then we never managed to survive the second one. We didn't really know how to play, or how to save, or anything. We were clueless.
This person played the game a little more and got to Yawn by twelve but wasn't able to get past him. I didn't touch the game again. Then Resident Evil 2 came out in 1998 and oh my non-deities, it was pretty and cool and there was this kind of pic in magazines:
I remember, I saw almost this exact pic but maybe it was in the helicopter corridor with the flaming zombies, maybe, I'm not sure, it was a long time ago. I was thirteen by then, haha, I felt like a grownup! I wanted to play it, I definitely wanted to play it! This kind of pic was in the "INDISPENSABLE TITLES" list of Playstation Magazine (French edition, actually a derivative of the French magazine Joypad by the same journalists), along with
Final Fantasy VII and
Gran Turismo. The more I looked at it, the more I wanted to play it.
A friend of mine, B, finally lent me the game after finishing it himself. I didn't give it back for six months or more. It was so amazing. Back then I was so bad B had to kill Birkin's final form (of A Scenario, the Birkin centaur) for me, though.
And then I became crazy about
Resident Evil. I bought
Resident Evil Director's Cut and finished it in all modes, again and again, and then bought
Resident Evil 2 and re-finished it, and bought
Resident Evil 3 when it came out, and for more than ten years I finished and re-finished every game in a loop until my video game time, my budget and my interest in the series all started fading.
(But way before that,
Resident Evil 4 was already a big disappointment, for various reasons I may develop in another post, in another thread.)
TL;DR: First played it back in 1996 with
Resident Evil 1 but just tried it, became a fan with
Resident Evil 2 in 1998. So I've been a fan for twenty years precisely.