1999, I was 14. Playing on a modded PS1, as everyone did back then.
All my friends at school were gamers like me, so we shared our games (on pirated discs we had to buy at street shops). One of those friends, my best friend at the time, bought a copy of this game called "Final Fantasy VIII", which finally came in an understandable language (back then we were just starting to learn English) and he played it thoroughly after classes ended. However, he didn't like it, and as I coincidentally got a cold that week, he lent me the four Verbatim gray discs to pass time as I recovered. I fell in love with the game, the music and the genre itself that very week.
Before VIII I didn't play any JRPGs, mainly because, as my country is in the "North American Region" (even if it is in South America) every one came in English back then, a language I couldn't speak before '98. That made me prefer playing games that didn't need text nor knowledge of the storyline to be enjoyable (platform, racing and fighting games). But with VIII it was different. It was in Spanish so I could understand what was going on storywise, I enjoyed the gameplay (even if I didn't really get the Junction System at that age) and as I was bedridden by sickness and had nothing else to do, I could give it all the time I wanted, and as a silly teenager I had a lot of time in my hands. Playing it was a magical experience for me. Since then I fell in love with the Final Fantasy franchise. I became what you could call a "Final Fantasy zealot" (or "fanboy", whatever you prefer).
Unfortunatety, as the game was pirated, it came with a copyright protection that prevented me from finishing it, as the game always froze at Ultimecia's secont-to-last transformation. It happened with every PS1 copy of the game I got my hands on. I couldn't finish it until four or five years later, when I got a copy for PC (pirated, of course). By that time I had already played VII and IX, and then the SNES ones, as my English improved (by emulation, by the way *ahem!*).
They say you always love your first Final Fantasy, and I love Final Fantasy VIII, with all its failures. I've played it a dozen of times and I know there are more re-plays of that game in my future.