I watched UFC 4 on a VHS I rented from a store in 2002; I had started doing karate a few months earlier and had gotten to be huge MA nerd, and I turned 16 that year and was able to start driving. I used a lot of the money from my part time job to rent martial arts movies, and when I got UFC 4 i thought it was a movie about a tournament.
I loved it, and rented and saw as many others as I could find. My brother got into it, and we bought a ton of prides on DVD too (we were big sakuraba and Igor vovchanchyn fans).
My karate school did kickboxing-style sparring once a week and a "grappling" class once a week, and for a long time I thought I was basically training UFC. Even after I quit, I did the backyard sparring with friends for close to a year and thought I was getting pretty tough.
I finally found wrestling and a sub grappling club when I was 20, then boxing for a year or two when I was 23, and then honest to god grappling/BJJ at an actual mma school (finally) when I was 25 or so.
I'm 28 now and a four-stripe blue belt, and I hope to keep grappling for the rest of my life, but I'm pissed I never put the work into finding something more real way back then. I could have been grappling for more than a decade now if I had really put the work in to finding some training years ago. 
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday UFC