Since everyone appears to be waxing nostalgic with the release of SSFIV I was wondering what everyones first fighting game experience was and were did you first play it? You never forget your first and how you ran into them. 
  
This is going to be long, sorry. 
  
My first fighting game was Street Fighter II and I found in in a Food Lion near my grandmothers house while she was grocery shopping.  Spent a LOT of time in that store after I found out you could electrocute people with the green man.  I couldn't have been older than 11.  I guess I was somewhat of a bully because I would wait for people to put in their quarters and then run up to the machine so I could pick on them with Blanka. I was too young and too naive to beat the AI that was designed to eat my quarters.  Made a few of them cry and even had a mother yell at me for picking on their kids.  I just wanted to play a winnable game!  
 
I was so obsessed with SFII that when I discovered it was out for the SNES I drew up a contract with my parents that if they bought me a SNES and SFII that Christmas I would clean the entire house 3 times a month.  Come Christmas mourning I was so excited that I shook all the boxes under the tree until I found the box that was likely the SNES and proceeded to knock myself unconscious on a knick-knack mail box my mother kept in the living room while getting up from the tree..  They found me the next mourning lying on the floor with crusted over blood on my head still clutching the box. (This is the point in which my mother realized gaming was going to be a problem, heh.) 
 
I got so angry at SFII that I often verbally threatened the SNES cartridge with disassembly.  I think if I could find the cartridge today you could still see teeth marks on it from when I was trying to beat Hard mode with Zangeif to see if it had a different ending. (I was dumb) My next door neighbor at the time remarked that he saw me toss something out of my window one summer.  Five minutes later I came out of the house and kicked the item across the yard and 10 minutes after that I came back out and picked it back up and went back in the house.  I was to embarrassed at my nerd rage to tell him it was a game. To this day I play with my mic turned off while playing online because I know I'm going to flip my shit when something I perceive is unfair happens, lol. Street Fighter is the ONLY franchise that causes this to happen, mostly because it goes back to my childhood I think.  
 
And then it happened....I played Final Fantasy VI and for whatever reason I didn't get back to fighting games again until SFIV.  I'm sad that I missed 3rd Strike but not so sad I missed the EX series, lol.  Okay, I gotta stop now.  So how did you react to your first real fighting game experience?