The very first computer in my family's house had 2 or 3 games on it, and one of those was Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. It was probably the first PC game I really played. I should thank my uncle, who gave us that computer and installed the games on it.

When I started playing WoW years later, it was out of curiosity because my brother was spending so much time on it. I made a human rogue and wandered around Elwynn Forest, totally clueless but enjoying the idea of this whole world to explore. I thought it made sense to kill things and loot them for copper so I could buy a complete set of white gear from the vendors in Goldshire. When I had to choose quest rewards, I thought Spirit sounded like a good stat to have, so that's what I picked. My brother was busy doing endgame content and I didn't know anyone else who played, so I didn't get very far. Later I came back in TBC and made a blood elf paladin and really got into the game, and finally hit max level and started raiding in Wrath.

I missed out on Warcraft 3 in between. Maybe someday I'll actually get around to playing it so I can fill that gap in my Warcraft experience.

I've got a fun story about that. Warcraft 1 - completely passed me by. Warcraft 2, that one I saw and played at my cousin's house who had a PC at the time. It was just about the coolest thing ever with that music and the voice lines. The cousin was a couple years older, and with the authoritativeness of a 14 year old, he proclaimed that cool dudes only played Horde, which young me took to heart. It wasn't until WoW Classic that I played anything Alliance related (turns out - Blizzard hates Horde and Alliance zones and cities are much better).

Then I was really into RTS when Warcraft 3 was in its heyday. Played it at some local tournaments (purely as Horde, of course). So when World of Warcraft was announced, I was curious. I was also playing Ultima Online at the time. So going from a full PVP full loot, player-driven MMO to WoW's theme park design was a bit jarring.

I wasn't entirely sold on the idea of it, so I tried the Vanilla release on a 'private' server. And let me tell you, these modern private servers aren't at all like they used to be back in the day. Pretty much nothing worked. Talents didn't work. Flight paths didn't work. Armor, of all things, didn't work. Quests didn't work. Pretty much all you could do was run around and grind mobs. And hilariously, monster pathing didn't work right either. So if you played melee, you could kite a mob, turn around to hit it, then keep running, and if you did it right, it would never hit you back. And if you played ranged, you could climb some tree and just shoot at mobs without fear of retaliation.

The whole thing was a mess and it soured me on the game for a while, until around the Wrath launch where all those cool promos with Ozzy and the like got me interested in it again. So I started playing on a real server around the end of TBC, technically. I believe my first character was around Winterspring when Wrath dropped.