I started in 2003 with mta vc 0.3 because my friend (who lived next to me) told me about it.
When sa:mp's first public beta there was a time i thought sa:mp would be better because they had a deathmatch mod released which looked very good, but quick after a couple of weeks it was getting very annoying already, bugs etc etc. Then this and this video came out and i couldn't wait any longer for mta sa dm so i continued playing sa:mp.
Then later i got banned for killing some '1337 admins' in some fair fights. They thought i was cheating. So there were no fun servers anymore so i started learning scripting in pawn just because i was bored. Later i opened a server on sa:mp to play on untill mta sa deathmatch will come out. (that took much longer then i expected, too long )