[Aardwolf]

I'd post this as a poll, but there aren't enough options in the world, so...

Let this be a place to tell the story of how you discovered and got your hands on FreeSpace / FreeSpace 2 / FS2_Open. Note, if your means of acquiring it were "less than legitimate" you probably shouldn't mention how you acquired it... but the story of how you got interested in it is still welcome!

[Thaeris]

GOG. Which, for the record, is probably the best method to date to get FS. I bought both FS1 & 2 from that location.

I was introduced to FS/FSO through BtRL. I'd have probably never gotten into the sim if it weren't for that wonderful demo. 

[General Battuta]

Played the demo, bought the game in '99.

[0rph3u5]

Short story long:
A friend of mine brough the CDs of Freespace along back in 1999. Said that the game was cool and I should give it a try... I jumped on the offer - next month I saved my money and got myself my own copy form the store  

That way started a long on-and-off relationship

[Scotty]

Got the OEM CD with my joystick, played it for years, then got the full game for Christmas last year.  Best Christmas present ever.

[QuantumDelta]

Demo was on a PC gaming mag disc back in '98 (FS1), bought it immediately with money from a gaming championship actually xD

[Angelus]

I bought the set ( white box with FS1+ST+Fs2 ) along time ago to be able to play the TBP project ( was a demo with a couple of missions ), which required FS2. After a while i forgot about that, since i prefer RPG over action games, and FS never seemed ... interressting enough. What a big mistake!

Years later, after finished playing the missions in TBP 3.2, i was looking for something new and i found some sceenshots of BtRL.
My first thought was, looks cool, but it has to be a fake ( C+C anyone?   ).

While downloading the BtRL demo, i prepared a mail to the DEVs of the game, just in case i was right and the game is a...PoS.
After playing it, i was amazed by the quality, so i joined the GW community.
I started Fredding, joined HLP, found by "accident" the old game cds while looking for something different, and then DLed FSO, was amazed and started recently a FS campaign.


EDIT: typos, you gotta love 'em. It was supposed to be ST, not ST:R.

[Mongoose]

I first saw the box for Descent: FreeSpace sitting on the shelf of a neighbor who had introduced me to the Descent series, but I thought it was just some weird spin-off thing and didn't really ask questions.  (Not having the Internets at the time meant that I couldn't look it up myself...ah, youth.)  I didn't think much more of it until I bought Descent 3, which had an ad for FS2 on its fold-out disk sleeve.  The little blurb about huge warships and these strange "Terrans/Vasudans Shivans" sounded interesting, so I kept it in mind.  I guess I eventually wound up picking up FS1 when I came across it in a store, and I was obviously immediately hooked.  (My younger brother used to be my "copilot" while I played, watching me and yelling out updates on things like hull integrity. ) I later wound up re-buying the game just to get the included Silent Threat expansion...maybe not the best money I ever spent, but whatever.  

Due to the ridiculously-high eBay prices, it took me a very long time before I was able to get my hands on FS2; all I had to tide me over was re-watching the trailer (can't remember which game that was included on...Descent 3: Mercenary, maybe?), playing the demo (must have gone through that several times), and gleaning random info from posts here on the forums, which I was lurking by that time.  It wasn't until Interplay announced their 20th anniversary re-release that I was finally able to get my hands on it...for $50, compared to the current $6, but that was cheap then. Needless to say again, I was hooked even harder than I had been with FS1.  It took me a lot of waffling before I plunged in and attempted to get FS2_Open up and running, since the installation process wasn't nearly so well-documented as it is now, but that eventually worked itself out too.  (Good old 3.6.7...you crashed so often.)  Obviously enough, I've been hanging out here ever since.

[Falcon]

A long time ago I regularly loaned PC games I had to people from my church, who in turn loaned me their PC games. One of the games I was loaned was Freespace 2. Played and was hooked. The guy who loaned it to me let me keep the game in the end.

[Dark Hunter]

My father and I were are both avid Descent players, and he bought FS1 when it first came out thinking it was another Descent title. He never got into FS's style of gameplay and abandoned it early, but I picked it up and enjoyed it immensely.

Didn't play FS2 until years later. Like so many others, I didn't even know a sequel had been made. I think it was the ad in Descent 3 that eventually tipped me off. Got it off of eBay for a ridiculous price (GOG wasn't stocking it back then), and found my way here a few months later after hearing about Inferno.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Got the OEM CD with my joystick, played it for years, then got the full game.

That way for me too. The joystick is broke now (Logitech), but I am eternally grateful to them

[Scotty]

Heh, I still use that same joystick to play FS, even ten eleven years after the fact.

[Snail]

I wrote a Biography on the subject.

[Spoon]

Read reviews, looked awesome
Played the demo a long long long time ago but I was still young and filled with fanboy feelings 'Wingcommander was better!' also, I didn't had money to buy each game I liked back then.

Fastforward a few years, saw the package of FS1+silent threat in stores in a foreign country, had my dad buy it for me. Could never get it to play. Lost the CD somewhere along the way.

Fastforward again to about a year ago. Saw a thread on 4chan's /m/ about freespace and how it was 'freeware'. Downloaded it from here and loved it to death. Then got into modding. Finally bought the game from GoG a short while back (didn't even downloaded it from there)  

[ShadowGorrath]

Vasudan Commander told me about it, then showed the FS2 ending cutscene and gave me the FSO installer link, which, at that time, allowed downloading the full game. Played retail FS2 at first though, not FSO.

[redsniper]

I played Descent as a wee lad and somehow became aware of FS with this new magical internet. I thought it seemed like a dumb knock-off of Tie Fighter (aliens with five legs?! That's just silly) and just wrote it off.

Years later (2000, I think) a friend of mine from school came over with a newly purchased copy of FS1. I still thought it was dumb, but he seemed excited, so I didn't want to burst his bubble. We installed it on my family computer at the time and HOLY **** THIS IS AWESOME! We ended up playing to around the Taranis missions.

A little while later my mom took me to pick out a game for my birthday. I was pretty set on MW3: Pirate's Moon, but decided to check all the aisles... and there I saw FS2. I was torn, then saw I could make my own missions (like with Half-Life!) and that was that.

Made for a ridiculously awesome summer.

[Nuclear1]

Played the original demo from the PC Gamer disc, got the full game for Christmas, played the FS2 demo soon as it was released, then got the full game for my birthday.  So, literally, I've been playing FS since I was ten. 

[Dragon]

I found FS1 and FS2 on my father's shelf and decided to play (my father said it was medicore, but he prefers elite-style games like X3 or Freelancer).
I liked it, but didn't considered it state of art and forgot about it quickly (I was playing many games then).
Then, I encouncered Inferno and started to tweak it, and while I heard about Inferno SCP (it was actually an SCP path) I decided to try out what this "SCP" is.
After that, I started trying out mods, at first mainly to get new models to play with, but I got interested later.
I never really liked FS that  made (partilly thanks to Polish translation), too much (I consider Wing Commander to be better), but the vast number of mods, new possiblities, constant engine improvememnt and simpleness of the modding system made me stick with FSO engine.
Blue Planet, Sync and Transcend were also a major factor which convinced me that mods based on FS story and using it's shipset could also be interesting (though I got bored with Derelict).

[Goober5000]

( white box with FS1+ST:R+Fs2 )

wat

[-Norbert-]

I too first heard from Descent FreeSpace (or rather "Conflict. FreeSpace" as it was called in Germany and Austria for some reason) from a gaming magazine. Not sure wether it was Gamestar or PC games....
Played the demo and then bought the game. Actually it was the first game I ever bought myself, all the others up to then I got for christmas or birthday.
FS2 I bought on the first day it hit the stores and it also was the very first game I ever palyed online. Ahh the momories.... never played anything like Squadwar ever since.

Anyway because I'm a big Babylon 5 fan I found TBP and got hooked up with it back when it was still on Volition Watch. When they moved over here, I naturelly moved over with them and that was the first time I ever learned of SCP (3.6.7 times if I remember correctly).
And I've been a fan ever since, even did some very minor voice acting for Blue Planet (3 lines).