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
back when I spent all my time buying/selling/trading music, and when I knew precisely as much Japanese as required to buy/send overseas and absolutely no more, I used to trade with a JP distro guy who'd toss random paraphernalia in every package, and one time he sent me a an Arcadia guidebook for Guilty Gear XX—I knew nothing about it and made no attempt to read it, but the cover art of I-No with THE MIDNIGHT CARNIVAL carved into her arm (the same one they used for the JP PS2 box art) stuck out to me
not too long after that, I saw a friend had a burned copy of GGX for Dreamcast and made him play it for maybe ten minutes, during which he spent the entire time whining that we weren't playing Mortal Kombat Gold; that was long enough for me to register it A Thing That Is Cool, but I'd all but given up on games at that time and idk how many years it was between then and actually playing it for real
The Fighters Generation is how i learned about Guilty Gear and many other fighting games. i was obsessed with looking at the sprites for fighting games for a while (arguably i still am, but it's different when you're a youth with little experience or exposure to the games themselves), and TFG was one of my primary sources of looking at sprites and characters for random fighting games. just looking at some of the designs, with no experience actually playing the games, actually deeply inspired my own art and character designs when i was young.
the playable games continued to evade me for most of my life until i stumbled on a Wii version of Guilty Gear XX Accent Core. i got insanely hooked on M.O.M Mode and Survival Mode. for a while i knew how to use every character on a base level, and was even developing some fun and cool (to me at least) dust combos with HOS and Jam, my 2 mains at the time. hundreds of hours logged in that game, and didn't play another human player a single time.
haunted by how my first exposure to GG was a fucking penny arcade comic that I only remember mentioning "rock and roll witches" and a panel of Order Sol and I had essentially no further visual or auditory exposure to the franchise until I saw a trailer for Xrd and went "well I'm buying that obviously"
I frequented a lot of anime sharing sites and MUGEN forums in the 2000s and I was exposed to Guilty Gear's fantastic sprite work and somehow fell into playing Missing Link because it was the only game I could acquire at the time. I fell further down when I managed to a hold of the XX#R PC port that went around and had a big Guilty Gear phase in high school. I ended up buying Isuka (used) and Accent Core (not Plus R) before heading off to college.