October 28, 2011 10:35 AM EDT
I don't exactly remember as it was over 14 years ago, when I was a Junior in High School. I started with either Daggerfall or Battlespire, it's foggy, and I think I just saw the box at Wal-mart. I had a pretty crappy Compaq (1997) but was able to play Daggerfall and I played it for years. I loved everything about it, enough of it was incredible that it was simple to overlook bugs and I usually had multiple back-up saves (just because back then, barely anything didn't crash.)
I played Battlespire a bit but it didn't have the open world like Daggerfall. I never completed either one of them though I likely put hundreds of hours into Daggerfall. To this day there is still nothing like it, they bit off more then they could chew when they made it but they learned their limitations which prepared them for more detail over quantity. When Morrowind came out it was amazing but different. Gone were random cities with random people. The trade off of fewer people were more detailed people and it was amazing. The exploration, the magic, the people, it was a blast. I did beat Morrowind, I had a House Telvanni mage and nothing was cooler than the stronghold you received and working through that questline of backstabbing mages.
I'm still playing Oblivion and have been since it was released. I have never completed the main quest, I couldn't bring myself to "end" it even though I know I could have kept playing, I like the feeling of having a constant cloud over the game, and a nemisis (Camoran) that keeps popping up. If I do the same thing in Skyrim, it will depend on a few things, mainly, what difference it makes on the world.
So short answer, been here since the beginning.