I copied and pasted one of my reddit comments, I think the question was which game did you first emulate? Or something. Anyway:
This is gonna sound weird, but Pokémon. Back when I was a wee boy, I was an exclusively PC gamer (since dad was a PC nut and setup my desktop as always). However I always felt out-of-place whenever I heard some of my buddies talking about this "cool new Pokemanz game" on their Gameboy. I didn't have a Gameboy at the time, so I was shit outta luck.
Until I discovered that you can allegedly play Gameboy games on PC (!!). I downloaded myself a .gb file of Pokémon, and struggled with it trying to "play it" (including renaming the file to .exe lmao, stupid child me). Eventually enough research led me to this app called "Hgb", which I didn't know at the time was an emulator. Didn't know how it worked but I managed to load the ROM on it; the rest, as they say, is history.
Using emulators may seem like a simple thing to everyone, but back in the early 00s there was hardly any information about it for casual users. And I was also a dumb 13 year old kid at the time who chanced upon the treasure that is emulation gaming. Because of it I discovered so many more legendary games like Zelda, Chrono Trigger, that I wouldn't have played if I remained ignorant of emulation. Thank you ZSNES, Snes9x, Gen, NESTicle, No$GBC, Connectix VGS, Bleem!, etc etc. All of these were a huge part of my childhood. (Also I was never a fan of those "one app emulates all" emulators like Retroarch
).