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[ricemastah]

When I first saw it... it was late 2006 and it was the first ASCII game I had ever seen. I was watching over the shoulder of a friend who was talking about the game and it was then that I knew I had to play it. It was a beautiful moment.

[Tormy]

I had no trouble with the graphics.
I played nethack for a couple of years, then adom, then I found DF.

The learning curve though...
Let's just say I went through 2 metric shit-tonnes of trial and error.
There was a little bit of wiki hugging, but not much.
I was too impatient to read the wiki thoroughly at first.

Same here. Gfx wasn't a problem, since I played with many roguelikes before I discovered DF....as for the learning curve..well yeah, DF is as complicated game at first look. Thankfully we have a wiki now. When I started to play, we had no wiki, so we had to post on the forum in order to get some help. 
Good old days. IIRC even Toady was an active poster in the Gameplay Questions subforum. Thankfully he doesn't have to do that anymore, so he can spend more time on the development of the game. 

[adore_the_glassspider]

I had never played an ASCII game, or a PC game before my brother sent me Dwarf Fortress. I love the graphics--I prefer being able to use my imagination to "see" what's going on underneath all the symbols and text. I played the game obsessively (and wiki-hugged) for about three months straight. I did a lot of looking for fortresses, exploring, and giving them up.

I'm still looking for my own version of Dwarf Heaven, and I still can sit in front of DF and lose entire days if I let myself! And I still consider myself only in the beginning...I know I haven't wrought the destruction that my dwarves are capable of...LOL

--Spider

[Christes]

I knew a guy who was talking about it all the time so I checked it out.  I had never played an ASCII or indie game before.  It took me a while to get used to the graphics and the gameplay (thank god for the wiki).  After maybe a week, I had pretty much figured it out.

[Javewa]

On a snowy winter's night, I suddenly got a craving for a rouglike. So I went on the giant spiderweb and asked the mighty data-kraken Google "rougelike ASCII download". And it told me the classic tales of "NetHack", "Angband" and "Adom". But among these stories of the heroes of past and modern, mentions of a 'fisherdwarf' inkindled my curiosity. What an odd but clever title. The Kraken took me by the hand and showed me the Bay of Games (#12 as I later found out), where there were more of those curious creatures. There were swordsdwarves and axedwarves and at least seven of them. Intrigued as to where they left Snow White, or whether she was yet to be discovered, I plucked the book of "DF 0.21.104.19d" from the spider's enourmous constructed and took it home. Endeared by it's letters, but struck by the Curse of Confusion when I opened it, I started to climb the learning cliff step by step as the reading instructions told me to. Numerous worlds were flooded and countless dwarves found a great variety of deaths, before proper forts were built.

Congratulations, you have vanquished the vicious Wall of Text and gain 32 experience points.

[alway]

What got me past the graphics and learning curve WAS the graphics and learning curve. It insulted me personally, so I took it as a challenge.
And I actually LIKE the ASCII. It's coded, and I can recognise the symbols easily.
Granted, I can't tell a black bear from a giant bat, but still.

This. Plus the added bonus of taking all the best points of the Sims (building stuff and torturing the population) and adds all sorts of crazy and over the top methods of destruction!

[Anticipation]

Same here. My jaw dropped when I first saw worldgen. The game was a confusing at first but the level of depth and the incredible number of possibilities kept me playing. I don't remember where I first found out about it though. I vaguely recall seeing a link to it in some one's sig on another forum I used to frequent.

Though I'd argue that DF doesn't have "bad" graphics so much as it has "no" graphics.

I had the exact same argument with a friend of mine. The only difference is that she decided to make a point of not playing games which don't have graphics. I should get her onto boatmurdered...

[Jackrabbit]

I got into it the same way I get into everything worth my time. Fool around for half an hour with no knowledge of what the hell was going on, pick it up half a year later and actually try to learn and never looked back.