I played a couple short sessions at a friend who had Civ2 Gold aroung 1998-2000, but never really got the hang of it.
Then for some reason I decided I wanna try Civ3 late in 2001 or early in 2002 (not really sure), read a review, liked it, bought it, played VC3 probably for about a year almost every day, then stopped till PTW came out, got hooked again when a friend came over for a few days... We played every available second in hotseat mode, never did manage to finish though... So that gave me a few months of fun, and now just a week ago I recalled seeing C3C in a store, checked out two reviews, and downloaded it to try it out... Been playing almost non-stop since then, gonna buy it as soon as I can... Thinking back, VC3 is probably my best buy ever (the worst, btw, is the first Harry Potter video game. Argh! That game taught me the value of a review.)