I am 31, so probably in the middle of the age range. I remember seeing a thread about how people got into Shenmue, so I'll tell my story here then. :-)
I was reading about Shenmue 1 in a gaming magazine that was bought by my sister because "the girl on the cover looked so nice" (this was in December 2000). At the time, we did not have the money to buy a new console (living in Eastern Europe is tough), but when I read about Shenmue in that magazine, I knew that I want to get a Dreamcast just to play it. Fortunately, my parents got some extra money next year so they bought me a Dreamcast on 21st September 2001.
The problem was that they did not sell Shenmue anywhere in the city and I did not know that I could get it from another store from another city (being 13, I knew very little about how the world works). But then in March 2002, there was an advert in a local newspaper by a guy saying that he sells copies of PlayStation and Dreamcast games. It turned out that he was running a CD-burning business (because at the time, it was quite expensive to get a CD-RW drive), and he had dozens of Dreamcast and PlayStation CD images (again, I did not know that such things exist). So after phoning up the guy, my parents ordered me the first Shenmue game. I played it for weeks and weeks, I just loved the whole story and the Japanese atmosphere. At the time, I could speak English on a basic level, so I decided to translate the main cutscenes of the game. It took about 6 weeks, and then I showed it to my English teacher. She was very happy with my progress so she gave me an extra mark and told me parents that I should focus on learning English, because I seem to be good at it.
Almost a year has passed and I started to lose hope that I could ever play Shenmue 2. But then, I saw another advert which said that Shenmue 2 was available among the games offered by this seller. I jumped around happily, and my parents ordered the game for me. In late February 2003, I could finally play Shenmue 2. I remember playing the first disc for about 7-8 hours, and I almost collapsed from the tiredness I felt. But then in 3 days, I managed to complete the game (my parents even told at school at I was off-sick so that I could finish the game in one sitting).
Fast forward 12 years, and we have the Kickstarer announcement. By that time, I had already visited Japan twice, I went to Yokosuka, I had some American-styled burger in Dobuita, and I was planning to do the Hong Kong part of the Shenmue pilgrimage. I finished high school and university (I had English linguistics as my major), I moved to the UK, I built a career in IT, so I was very happy to put down $300 for the Kickstarter campaign.
Fast forward another 4 years, and now in 8 days, I will be playing Shenmue 3 (this time, the original game, and not a pirated copy) . It is just incredible.
