99 Luftballons, fliegen durch den Horizont...so 1984 for me. Civ (the original) was my second game ever (the first being 3D tetris on DOS), and probably my most played game til date, because for a long while i did not have any other games.
I come from Hungary and you have to know that getting games in the nineties was borderline impossible, if you did not know someone who dealt with pirated games. When i was around 10 I had a friend who knew someone, and from then on I played a lot of games (rather watched my friend play them as I did not have a PC after my parents divorce), including Civ 2, 3, and Call to Power, which I liked back then, although now I think it is kinda garbage.
CiV 4 was my second non-pirated game (the first being HL 2 due to CounterStrike, which is kinda weird as i was always rather crappy with FPS games) ever, i bought in on a trip to Germany, which pissed off my gf to no-end back then, as we werent exactly rich to put it mildly. But in hindsight Civ4 lasted way longer than that relationship
It is really funny when i think about only playing Civ 1 on Chieftain difficulty, I did not speak english back then and did not understand most of the game, and now I am only playing Civ 5 on Emperor / Immortal (not deity cause i hate the AI getting a free settler
. Although I am rather sure that Civ is one of the main reasons I learnt english so early