My first exposure to Fallout was Fallout 3, and when it was announced, I was pissed because Bethesda was working on that and not ES5 or expansions for Oblivion. (This was probably five or six years ago; I had just gotten my 360 and was playing Oblivion like it was nobody's fucking business).
I didn't really pay attention to it until E3 when they started showing it off and it was just :aaaa:. It looked like crazy good fun, and I couldn't wait. I ended up getting Fallout 3 for my birthday shortly after it came out. (It came mid october, if I remember correctly. My birthday is the end of October).
I played it. I played it alot. It didn't leave the drive for a good two weeks, and even then it was a regular visitor. Now, I've probably got around a seven hundred hours poured into the game across all of my saves (I figure I've played atleast five characters for over a hundred hours; plus other games I didn't take that far. It's a conservative number).
Then at one point, idling in some godforsaken IRC channel (my other huge timesink), I heard mention that the original Fallout games had gone up in a pretty cheap package ($15 for three games) and had no DRM on it; I promptly went to the Interplay site and purchased them, downloaded them over night, and spent a week trying to make them work on my mac, using things like Boxer, Darwine, and lots and lots of swearing.
Eventually I broke down, cleared some space, and bootcamped my MacBook. Set windows up, installed Fallout one, and booted it up.
And since then I've thoroughly, absolutely, unbearably thoroughly enjoyed the series, and built up steady stockpile of hate and derision for Bethesda.