Seriously tho I have no idea where I learned about gg it feels like it just mysteriously started existing one day many many moons ago and retroactively existed from that point
I do remember how I learned about Guilty Gear because it was the "kill your friends guilt free" magazine ad for the very first game.
And I also remember thinking "Wow, this game looks like shit."
nintendo power review of the ggx gba port. they said there was a guy with a bag in his head and i said 'wow thats so random'
i began going to locals in 2008 because of SSB Brawl netplay, got into playing Street Fighter 4 from there, and on one random night I played some version of GGXX against longtime Faust player Kyoku. i was too new to fighting games to remember anything besides the pogo sticks that hit my face and the cool styles that everyone had
My cousins, who are also into weeb shit shall we say, were at our place constantly when we were moving as my aunt and uncle were helping out a lot. Literally one of my cousins just happened to bring Guilty Gear X2: The Midnight Carnival #Reload for Xbox over one day, and I fell in love instantly (with the game and Ky Kiske). I explicitly remember him promising to lend it to me if I beat him, beating him and then... still not getting to borrow the game. Scammed... I got my parents to get it for me for Christmas a few months later. This was about 19 years ago right around this time of year... 😱
that one x-play review of GGXX that called Dizzy "half-angel/half-devil/half-devil" and a friend of mine I had a crush on was playing it so I picked up an emulator to play GGX Advance Edition
Then later I got a copy of Accent Core and saw Jam on the back and well the rest is history
I played The Missing Link on a Playstation at the same time I was listening to my Dad's Black Sabbath records and it ruined my life.
There was (maybe still is) a website I used to frequent as a kid called tehparadox, which was a forum with just shitloads of DDL links to pirated software. I had found the PC port of GGXX Reload among a collection of doujin fighting games like Melty Blood ReACT and Hinokakera Chaotic Eclipse. It didn’t ruin my life until all the poverty fighting games were done with me but we got there eventually
A friend of mine sat me down to play GGXX at Sunnyvale Golfland after I was kinda salty about how i did in a cvs2 bracket. We got it at the Bearcade soon after, and his parents made him quit games to focus on his career so he sold me his modded ps2 and his copy of XX. I still have the PS2.
Box art looked sick at a Blockbuster so we rented Guilty Gear X. I took some AOL discs at the register and threw them like frisbees in the parking lot. What a time capsule.
I had a cable modem back when the Dreamcast came out and so my friends and I were downloading all the ISOs we could find with little regard for recognition or quality. Guilty Gear X landed a lot better than the Lodoss War game or Tokyo Bus Driver or Sengoku TURB!
A couple years later we'd actually get an XX machine at an arcade nearby but most of my early GG experience was friendlies in the home. First GGX on DC, and then X2 on the OG Xbox which we could sideload custom BGM into since it was soft-modded. Can't remember for the life of me who I gave custom songs to or which songs they were though. I was smoking a lot of weed back then.
