I discovered ZC thanks to Twilight Princess, of all things. Let's rewind way back to 2006 (good lord, that was ten years ago, help I feel old). The Wii was coming out soon, and I was
hyped. Mario Galaxy looked to be just about the coolest thing my 11-year old mind could comprehend. But sadly, I noticed, it wasn't a release title. So I tried to find a launch title that I would like. Twilight Princess caught my eye. The Zelda series was one I knew quite a bit about (in large part due to Smash Bros), but had never played (unless you wanted to count the Minish Cap demo they had to show off how cool the GBA SP was at Best Buy). So I decided that Zelda would suffice until I could get my hands on Mario Galaxy.
When I looked up things about the game, I stumbled onto a particular interview. Aonuma had said that the game could be enjoyed on its own, but it would be even better if you were familiar with older Zeldas. Clearly, he was talking about OoT, which TP is a spiritual successor to, but I wasn't aware of that. So I decided I'd start from the start, with Zelda 1. At the time, I knew nothing about emulators, so I was playing it on a site called vNES, which was basically an emulator built into a webpage. The only issue was it didn't support saving, so I had to beat the game in one sitting. Yeah... that didn't happen. Another problem was I was bad at Zelda.
So, confused as to where to go after the first few dungeons, I went to GameFAQs, and stumbled upon
this handy guide. Aside from having awesome ASCII maps, it had a little info blurb about this cool program called Zelda Classic. It solved my problem of not being able to save, and seeing the
amazing BS graphics it offered (since BS Zelda 1 was conveniently packaged with ZC 2.10 and pre-loaded as a save file), I knew I had to play it. And after that, I started poking around with custom quests and looking at the AGN forums. And the rest is history.
I sometimes wonder how many people found ZC through that same GameFAQs walkthrough. Whoever you are, Dan Simpson, you're an awesome guy.