I got hooked on space sims with Elite, on Commodore 64. After that, I turned my world upside down to get a PC (the mighty 486 DX, with all the 4 MB of RAM...) so I could play Frontier, and First Encounters
Then, came the Privateer... Wing Commander series... and then came Freelancer (I haven't played Starlancer untill after that) ..
And so, I played the game lots of times, and allready played online on Hamburg City server, when my ping went wild and scarry, so I looked up for an alternative. I tried EVE, it was nice, but haven't tried it enough to decide if I'd pay for it or not, so I googled for some free servers... couple of days later, I discovered Discovery mod on moddb ... after a false start, playing as a Corsair (old habits die hard, what can I say...) then forgetting about it, going back to Hamburg, getting my chars deleted... I came again... just in time for 4.85 and it's first Beta... and got hooked.