_Lynx
Heh, looking back I see that UT had the biggest influence on my life. Back in 2000, one of my friends shown me a game he recently got - UT. He had a great PC by that time with 3Dfx card which handled UT nicely and when I saw that small tutorial level with stained-glass windows and then Agony, Peak and Barricade, I was done for.
Back then I had no PC, and played UT at gaming clubs or when I visited my friend. In a year or so I knew I wanted to have a good PC to be able to play at home and so I started looking into all this hardware "mumbo-jumbo" as I saw it back then. And in half a year I had a PC which allowed me to play UT, though in software rendering but I was happy just to play. That PC was the only one in our family that was not assembled by me. The stuff I learned about hardware and software back then helped me greately.
Soon after I got my own PC, being curious at how the game was done, I got to the the editor. I did not know much so I wasn't able to do anything for the game. Then, while browsing russian Unreal-related websites I stumbled upon UT translation, and I decided to check it out. My first reaction was "you call that a translation?" and I ended up modifying to my own liking. And that became a second milestone for me. Later there were custom translations for UT2003, UT2004 and then, after I finished my education as a lawyer I understood that while being lawyer is promising, it's not something I want to do for a living. So I sent my resume to a few of the russian game publishing companies, and got employed and that's where I'm working now, doing what I always enjoyed and was good at - localizing games into Russian.
In June 2004 I noticed a post here, at BU which I was visiting once in a month or so, about planned Bonuspack - BuFBP. I sent a couple of mutators which became part of the pack for some time. Later, when FragBU bonus-pack was released, they were dropped, but by that time I got addicted to FragBU and played a lot. Most of my friends at BU, including Hal, Brizz, Haarg, Hyru, RaffiB, DP I met back then, while working on the pack. The downside of that period of life is my weird day schedule which pretty much remains the same since then - staying up until 5am (9 PM Eastern Time) is quite usual for me.
So, in nine years I'm into UT, the game gave me a lot besides simple fun from playing it - it motivated me to learn a great deal of technical stuff both on hardware and software which is vital now-days, it helped me to get a great job where I do what I always liked doing and get paid for that, and the most valuable thing - it allowed me to know a lot of great people from around the globe.