Here's my story.
My attraction to SW began back in 1996. The only SW movie I recall consciously seeing, was ROTJ, and it was of extremely bad quality, with static and so forth on free-air TV. However, in that year, I started secondary school( 4 year school, ending in GCE "O" Levels). There, I encountered the game SW CCG. Now, I had an extremely vague idea of what SW already was then, and as I started playing the game, well, the game got me beyond the movie and into the EU specifics I guess. Then, by pure chance, I borrowed the novel Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn, which absolutely drew me into SW bigtime. I then hooked up with a guy who termed himself Darth Vader, or Darth Star Wars Freak, found a couple of SW fans who also played the card game and then my journey to the Dark Side was complete.
My... initial distaste for the EU inaccuracy was also born during this period, when the X-wing games were begining to be popular. Blue proton torps, blue ion cannon, vs red proton torps and ion cannon. Nuff said.
The stages for the vs debate was set a year later in 1997, when the battletech CCG was released. I was already a btech fan then(indeed, the same btech players were the same people who sucked me into SW CCG in the first place) and as such, was recognised as an authority on btech along with this other.... trekkie. Now, my entire class somehow got sucked into this trading card game, and we somewhat spread it along the entire school, although our class remained the nexus for the game. The trekkie and me soon began to go loggerheads at each other, as I resented his "house rules" interpretation for btech, his blatent incompetence and ignorance of the universe while attempting to pass himself off as a superior authority on me. Then one day, he cast a stone into the pond. One that would lead me to here.
"Star wars, do you know that Star Wars is satanic?"
Now, we were in a christian school, and saying this was akins to saying someone was gay. My friend and I, (the one who would say "I hate to be in your platoon" in my quote) then rebutted him angrily, and stated that if SW was satanic for the reasons he stated, then ST was equally, if not more so, as ST attempted to cover it up.
We lost that argument.
I enjoyed a few eps of TNG then, which was on its reruns on midnight. Even more strangely, somehow or another, I had caught a few episodes of TOS in my youth and was drawn to that series. In an attempt to make up for this lost ground, I.... re-immersed myself back into both genres.
Forward 2 years.
A btech RPG/Story Debate I was in at Utopia, finally made its decisions to shift away from the Utopia forums, which was limited to 100 posts per thread. And so, Slacker and Big Steve led me to this strange place, called spacebattles. Inside the story debate, our war to defend earth raged on, until it ultimately began to taper off towards the end, sometime after I ordered the Arrow IV missile strike on a nuclear powerplant. Precentor Oshay, a later SW debator cleaned up the mess I left and as the story headed towards its ineveitable end, I looked over the various others forums present there. And found the vs debates column. A place where I could use the knowledge I learnt. My first debate was with E1701 and Third of Five, and got off to a wrong start, and I had to apologise immediately after, as I had tagged on an additional zero to the height of the stratosphere. And so it began.
In a sense, it could be said that battletech led me to star wars.
.... I barely missed that mark, I think.... 
