lol You remind me of myself as far as getting into video games at an early age. I started playing games at 3, but unfortunately, at my time of being that young, we only had the games like Pac-Man, Missile Command, Centipede, and the rest of the Atari games.
In other words, I'm near 25 now.
Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand.....My first time playing CT was (I think) about 2 years after it had been released. A friend of mine told me about the game and being that he noted I liked the FF games, I should try CT out. Being that I heard good things about the game in the past, I took his word for it and decided to try it out at his house while I was hanging out.
Now, he decided to go an opposite direction of what most gamers would do and he asked me if I wanted to beat the game immediately. I said "sure" so he decided to get a NG+ going for me. He guided me through the "cheap" method to fight Lavos and the first ending I ever saw was the development room ending. This could be something to do of why I like the development room endings (or it could just be that I think the developers are just funny and extremely messed up...).
At any rate, a few weeks later, I asked him if I could borrow the game from him and he let me. Despite his "advice", I started with a true New Game rather than a NG+ because I don't believe in cheating and I wanted a challenge. I could not stop playing this game from that moment forward. It got to the point where I kept replaying the game over and over and about a month later, he was kind of getting on my ass for me to give it back.
I think it was about 3 years later that I saw another friend of mine had this game. I played it for a bit and got to the part of the bridge war in 600 within about 2 hours (or less (I don't know for sure as this was 6 years ago...)). But he couldn't let me borrow it because he was borrowing it from someone else. I think later that day, I called a local game store and asked if they had it in stock. They had a used copy so I went there immediately, bought it, and finally had the benefit of having my own copy.
Of course, when I heard a re-release was coming out for PSX, I went and bought that too, but in that case, it was mainly for the sake of getting FF4 and because I didn't own a copy of that. But I was still quite impressed with all the extras that the PSX CT had and made it my priority once again to unlock all endings and see all the bonus features.
But anyway, that's my story regarding CT.