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[knutor]

An formated drive on a used PC had it.  I executed it without scanning it for viruses.  Now I'm forever afflicted.

[noobnubcakes]

Minecraft and Tvtropes.

[HavingPhun]

I heard about it from minecraft and I was like nah I'm not gonna play that. Then I ended up seeing it on wikipedia about games with procedurally generated worlds. I didn't like the ascii graphics but I still wanted to play and found tilesets.

[scout890]

I found dwarf fortress while browsing encyclopedia dramatica late at night. I was initially put off by the ASCII but. I was determined to figure out how to play it as it had pretty much everything I was looking for in a game at the time. I quickly figured out how to play after reading through the wiki for a bit.

[Circusdawg]

I just found out about Minecraft and i read about it it said it was heavily inspired by dwarf fortress so i looked it up and when i saw the website i downloaded the game and closed it right away and about a year later i was watching jefmajors lets plays of adventure mode and i started on adventure but i eventually got bored and didn't play for a week then i tried fort mode and i looked up Dwarf fortress tutorial and i found captnducks videos and now i am dying to a gobling armed with a liama wool coat

[Urist_McArathos]

I cannot find where I first heard about the game...I thought for certain it was a Cracked.com article about hard video games, but a thorough search reveals no evidence of such an article.  It's a mystery...

I distinctly remember feeling like too many games today were too easy, and was intrigued by the author's description of Dwarf Fortress as a nigh-impenetrable mess of ASCII that did not tolerate mistakes.  To paraphrase what I remember: "Forget to bring barrels for booze?  Your dwarves all die.  Leave the door open when goblins attack?  Your dwarves all die.  Let a wandering elephant get too close?  Your dwarves all die."  The fact it was ALL in ASCII really blew my mind; a game that complex, unforgiving, lacking in any instruction, AND without precious graphics to even HELP you make heads or tails of it?

I was excited; I wanted to test my mettle against this ultimate in gaming challenge.

Of course, I now know most of the article was hyperbole...to a degree.  If you've got access to the wiki, even without reading the spoilers the game becomes much, MUCH easier to play and survive.  By then, of course, I'd read Boatmurdered and Syrupleaf, and found the level of detail too much to resist.  I always wanted a game this involved, complex, and detailed.  Shortly thereafter, I built my first fort, and everyone died of thirst in the winter when the water froze and I was out of booze.  I reclaimed, and tried to build a well, and drowned my entire fort.  I reclaimed again, and tried to irrigate a field, and flooded my fort a third time.

Instead of being annoyed, I was hooked.  This game was the game for me.

I -still-, despite searching many, many times for the original piece that brought me here, CANNOT find it online anywhere.  It's as though it has vanished into the aether, its purpose in the universe fulfilled.

[misko27]

TvTropes article on stupid AI descisions, of course. I loved literally every word of everything written. Then I read the avtual article on DF on tvtropes. It sounded so fun, and so complex... I resisted the urge for a while, saying "what about school", and "it sounds expensive", and "you'll just get bored with it like you always do." I have ADHD, and no matter how much I loved a game, If I played it for too long, I grew bored. Then I went to the sight, just as .34 had been released. 

I tell you, I havent gotten bored at all in dwarf fortress, partially because I'm allowed to work on, say, new things for my craftsdwarfs to do, then to the worn-out clothing problem, then to mining, and so on. I can suceed at some little task, then move on to the next thing, cause so much work is nescasary, I never run out of things that need work. It DOES have a problem with leaving some longer projects unfinished, but I can get to them when its needed.

Of course, the randomly-generated randomness is awesome. A giant jumping spider attacks a hunter, injures her and kills her baby. BUt, as it finishes the baby off, the mother suddenly springs into action, perforating it with bolts. Unintentional baby armor, i guess. Still, Jumping spider meat for all!

[Ai Shizuka]

I used to play Civilization 4 a lot and found a big thread about DF in the 'other games' section of CivFanatics. Tried and loved it.
I don't remember wich version I started playing on, but it was after 3D implementation.


EDIT: when I read my first tutorial and found a 2-pages essay about building/carving stairs I almost skipped the game altogether.
Then I actually tried it and found it wan't hard at all, pretty much like everything else in the game.
No hard concepts to grasp by themselves. Just A METRIC FUCKTON of different concepts, all tangled together. Fascinating.

[JimmyBobJr]

I used to play Civilization 4 a lot and found a big thread about DF in the 'other games' section of CivFanatics.

Man thats crazy, thats where i first heard of DF.

This was after i saw LOTR on DVD and i was in love with dwarves, and when i saw the "Dwarf" part of "Dwarf Fortress" i knew i had to take a look.

[SanDiego]

A friend of mine started to play and then he sent me link to Boatmurdered. And I was sold.

[Urist McPenguinhead]

I had heard about DF somewhere before, but I only got interested when I found myself clicking a link to Boatmurded on someones sig on another forum.

[dakenho]

I found dwarf fortress by mentioning to a co worker that I hated the magical resourcing system of most video games

for instance in most games

you go out and collect a fictional resource with a harvester
you bring it to some type of refinery (some times you don't even need to do this step)
profit

I always admired the settlers series for forcing a player to make an actual logistically based economy so dwarf fortress fit it quiet well.

[Laurin]

I am a long time roguelike player (started with Moria back on the Amiga in ye goode olde days ...).

I stumbled over early versions of Dwarf Fortress every now and then. I read a lot of articles and always thought I should try that one day.

Finally the tutorials by TinyPirate and some other guys managed to get me into the game.
I was fascinated by the dazzling amount of detail.

My first fortresses all ended in a mess. You know - thirsty dwarves throwing tantrums, goblins stealing and slaughtering erverything, lost miners starving to death on disconnected stairs, and so on.
One day I got a dwarf injured because of a little cave-in. Some minor injuries and a broken arm I believe.
I wondered what to do and found the hospital at the wiki. Trying to set one up sent me on a rollercoaster drive, figuring out how to do it und to get all the stuff you need just to get a hospital going.
That being amazing enough, then the doctors came and diagnosed and treated my dwarf, he got fed and pampered, sutured and plastered.
After reading the medical history sheet I was even more amazed.

I am still blown away by the little details you can find in every little nook from depictions on furniture to personal histories of dwarves and sparkling bits and bobs like a dwarf liking cows for their haunting moos.

[darkrider2]

I was looking around in the Infinity forums when something caught my eye. A bunch of guys were doing a succession fortress of this game, and I said I'd take part. It was called steam-something, or something-steam I don't remember. All I know is this thing was freaking ridiculous, they had a system of locks going up the mountain transporting water, and a giant waterfall in front of the main entrance, and some kind of huge archer tower that was 4x6 and 10-15 levels tall. I didn't know where anything was or what anything was.

I had to pass my turn off.

But after that I came back to try to play the game on my own. And ended up hooked. My first successful fort was pretty messed up too, but that one was FUN.

EDIT: Ah, found it, the forts name was steamyworks. And holy crap I think I saw Japa's name in that thread.

Spoiler: Found a picture of the entrance (click to show/hide)

[Viking]

I believe a sibling told me about it when we were getting into minecraft. It was a ridiculous learning curve but I guess I understood its potential so I stuck it out.