My first exposure to tabletop RPGs (as opposed to traditional LARPs like "Cowboys and Indians" and "Cops and Robbers") was the summer of 1979 (between my junior and senior years of high school), when my then-best friend John came back from a long family vacation raving about this amazing new game he'd been introduced to, "Dungeons and Dragons". He didn't have a copy of the rules, but that didn't stop us from free-form roleplaying for the rest of the summer. Although fun, the unevenness of the experience left me with a desperate need for more structure in my gaming, so I ended up getting my hands on TSR's mail-order catalog, and decided, well, let's start at the beginning, why don't we? And I ordered the original three-booklet box set of D&D.
You know, the one that assumes you have the Chainmail miniatures rules.
Which I didn't. I also didn't have a clue what the hell it was talking about with "Man + 1" combat abilities and stuff.
But it was enough to prove my friend had been talking about a real game, and it was radically different from anything I'd ever seen before.
I kinda tried to use that set for the next year or so, but it was, really, like trying to run le Mans without tires. Or an engine. It looked great, but it didn't go anywhere.
It wasn't until I got to college that I actually started playing for real, and that was because I found a copy of the AD&D1 Player's Handbook in my college bookstore. And the DMG. And the Monster Manual. And other stuff which I ordered (and still have -- like the 1st edition Deities and Demigods, the one with the Cthulhu and Erewhon chapters which got lawyered out of later reprints). I found a campaign, a couple years later started my own, and the rest is sort of history... And that, children, is how I ended up being a paid game writer for a few decades.
-- Bob
(But yeah, I remember the "red dragon, blue cover" edition. I found it when I was already far enough down the road that it was just uselessly weird to me.)
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My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.