Do you remember when and what helped you discover your affinity for furries? If you do, I'd like to hear your stories!
To get the ball rolling I'll start with mine. While I certainly can't pinpoint the exact date I became fixated on anthros, I can absolutely remember getting Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast when I was 7 or 8 (2000ish).
Seeing Tails was all I needed to get hooked, and want to be a cool fox like him. I didn't even have a word for it until I started using the internet years later, but my furry fate was sealed from then onward. It was the catalyst that got me into fantasizing about having fur and a big tail, and got me doodling lots of Sonic art as a kid. While I've long since stopped making Sonic art, Tails still holds a special place in my heart over 20 years later.
I'm 99% sure everything for me can be traced back to Blinx: The Time Sweeper, an old Xbox exclusive with anthro cats and pigs. Really awesome game, and to this day, I think it was a gem of mechanics and dynamics that it's a pity never became something more. That would've started in around '06. I was 3-4.
I didn't know the concept of furry until '16 or so, when I would've been 13-14. I had a fascination with fur and animal stuff, and a younger friend (he was like 12) said something like "Oh, so you're a furry?" A few googles later...I was like GOD NO. Came back by early-2017, with a more careful Google and an open mind, and yeah, I was. Joined a furry forum in mid-2017, and the rest is history. Seen a lot of stuff in my time here, but unfortunately, I arrived too late to see a lot of the furry community that used to exist in my local area. Just a few years too young to have caught RCFM.
While it's too bad you missed out on local furry stuff, I'm glad you were able to come back and discover the fandom after the initial rejection.
I vaguely remember Blinx, seeing it on those store TVs where you break your neck for a demo lol. Couldn't you literally rewind time briefly in that game? That was such a cool idea!
Yeah! You could basically warp time (and later, space in the sequel). Rewind to access areas, fast forward to jump things, pause to defeat enemies, and even record to have yourself so multiple things at once. I wish Microsoft and Artoon did something with that, but the popularity of Halo (namely in the US and EU markets) overshadowed every other Xbox exclusive.