How did you find out about Touhou?

[Kojiremi]

Once upon a time there was a facebook group page for Ar Tonelico

Back when the first one was the only one out. I became friends with the group creator(another college kid in Massachusetts) and we became friends via msn as well. One day i was playing Melty Blood Act Cadenza and i literally worshipped that game~ Then he comes up and asks me if I play touhou since we found out we play a lot of the same RPGs and fightin games.
Said no and then he showed me IaMP since MoF was the most recent game during the time. After putting it off for a long while i decided to ask him for the link and redownload the game and give the dam thing a try. I thought the chars was cute but the fighting system turned me off. I deleted it and went back to MB XD

Curiosity got the best of me since i was RANDOMLY running into fanart by it on occassion. So i grabbed it again and thought to try a different game (game 6) i was turned off by the fact it was a shooter. wasn't well versed in that genre. But i played Easy and after playin it, learning graze, patterns, etc. i thought it was cool. and kept it. then i tried IaMP again and thought to REALLY try learning it and i did.
Through blood and rage Remilia became my fave character almost entirely out of spite eventually (at first Reisen was my fave, then Mokou and then finally it became Remi and it stuck) and now i'm pretty adept at the games and found my way her. I even surpassed my friend who introduced me to touhou.

The End~

[Tonia-Tan]

Simply talking with a friend what kinf of games weplay and she mentioned touhou so i got to youtube saw it and tried it out^_^

[Jaimers]

Actually not through the music and characters!
Yes, big shocker here. 

I saw some guy on youtube LP PCB once, and the game looked fun and challenging, which is exactly what I look for in a game.
A week or so later I downloaded the demo, and from that point I was hooked.
I only found out later that there was this massive fanbase.

I never even heard of MC roll until after I had beaten EoSD Extra.  :V

[Rinnosuke Morichika]

Strangely enough, I have no clue. I went from "What's Toehouz?" to "How am I supposed to live without my daily dose of danmaku?" without pretty much any transitional stage.

Seriously, I don't know. This is going to bug me now..

[Sanae]

i l earned it form random advertising.
later the "holy Youtube LP's"
then a birthday present from a random freind i had. (touhou 7)
played it and said i MUST have the rest.
he sold his games to me for cheap price (1 - 5, and 6 - 12)
i was so happy, and now i do play TOUHOU everyday.
wow i feel like a freak.

[N-Forza]

Wait what?

Do you own physical copies of the PC-98 games?

[Sanae]

Wait what?

Do you own physical copies of the PC-98 games?

yup, he has piracied them.. but ohh well i buyed piracy, founded it out too late.
he will not buy them back.
A week ago, when i snuck around for new realeases of touhou games. looked for any words of touhou 13.
found then from an other forum, out someone else had a similar problem, where they have buyed by an unknown person (i dont say names for safe pupose) on a selling site (not EBAY!), but then she resended the CD (because of piracy thingy). i think i will sell it to another one, so i can get it free from me.

[N-Forza]

Oh, I was about to say...

Real copies of the original PC-98 games run for more than 100,000 yen here.

[Sanae]

Oh, I was about to say...

Real copies of the original PC-98 games run for more than 100,000 yen here.

hmm ok. i telled him what you said, and he said he got it from one of his au pair freinds (he was in England in 1 year as student) he don't know where it come from, but he says that it is not been pirated.
i hope it is true (shiver trough me if it was piracy)
hmm i know you, you are the one who buys form internet and sell it to other people.
mayby w will buy from you one day.
i live in denmarrk By the way.

[Ai-chann]

My friend showed me the Bad Apple video, and I was like, "this is hot, where is this from?"  He told me the characters are from Touhou, so I was like, "let's youtube this game."  I saw how ridiculous it was, and wanted to try it.  I got a demo, and was hooked. 

[MaronaPossessed]

Shamefully it was from this video that got me starting to look for more information on Touhou.

[Tsym]

Slow transition...  I remember seeing Marisa Stole the Precious Thing, but it never really incited me to search for Touhou...  I think I came across it when I came across Dan Kim.  I looked through all of his 4chan postings and I suddenly got really interested .  Obviously it was the "go go Touhou Rangers"!  That ultimately got me to googling "Touhou".  The honk honk and green ranger were obviously integral as well

[Gammeru]

Six years ago, the demos for EoSD and PCB were featured on a site called Gamehippo.com(dead now). I downloaded those and fell in love with the series for life.

[Snaka]

U.N Owen remixes
Marisa stole the precious thing parodies
Google touhou
Download demo
And the rest was history awesome.

[Treasurance]

Gotcha, found this thread. Anyways...I had just played the demo of World of Goo on my Wii, so I went to search for the shareware game "Tower of Goo" on the web, because I had heard that World of Goo originated from it. On that same site where I found ToG was the demo of Perfect Cherry Blossom. I downloaded it and...(what do you call it, Avalanche Effect?) happened, and now I'm so totally hooked that anything that isn't Touhou is boring. Apparently there was no Youtubing involved. 

[GuyonFire]

Touhou was plastered on the internet.  All over the place.  Everywhere.

I eventually caved in to see what the appeal was.

I'm now "one of them", and happy to be there.

[P♂ zeal]

Someone I knew who was testing their web host put the flash movie marisa stole the precious thing on it . I watched it and thought it was about lesbian robots or something, but the tune was really really hooking, I listened to it a lot and I wondered "wtf is this from?"
Like, a month later, some of my other internet friends were talking about playing touhou and I finally looked it up and realized "oh hey this is what that flash was based off of!".
God I feel stupid having thought it was about lesbian robots.
It's clearly about lesbian everything.

* P♂ zeal is shot

[7TC7]

Oki~

1. I was frequenting the imagesite Minitokyo at that time and were looking witch new pictures were uploaded everyday.
2. Saw someone uploading some REALLY cool looking pictures one day.
3. They included this one http://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=31974
4. The Artist of the pictures was labeled as "Touhou". Saved them as that and didn't bother any more.
5. More pictures of the artist appeared and I really liked the characters, so I wanted to find out more about them.
6. Typed touhou into youtube -> found "strange dot pictures I didn't even bother to click at" (aka. the normal shooters)
7. Also found fighting game videos and, oh, there is the silver haired girl from my picture again.
8. Watched a battle of Someone VS Youmu on Youmus Day-Stage in IaMP.
9. Heard the Music, mind was blown, wanted more.
10. Searched for IaMPs OST, didn't find it thought, because I typed it with a small L instead of an capital i.
11. Somehow stumbled upon the touhou wiki -> later with informations from there I found an download of all OSTs from Th 1 - 9.5
12. Download took forever and a half, so I researched more, found out that the Shooters were the main games, tried some demos, finally listened to the music, found remixes, full games and in the end I was lost in a fantasy world to share with a lot of others.


...


13. Started to hate Youmu for being the worst opponent in every freaking game she appears is.

[Tengukami]

In 2007. I was on Desuchan, on the /alice/ board, of course, and I saw we have a new board called "Touhou". So I checked out and saw quite a bit of intiguing artwork and people talking about what an incredible game this is. This prompts me to Google, which brought me to the Mountain of Faith demo, which I went with solely because it was the most recent one. That hooked me from the start, and MoF still has a special place in my heart because of it.

It was only after playing Imperishable Night that I realized I had seen the IOSYS video 'Stops at the Affected Area and Immediately Dissolves' in 2006 on a wholly unrelated forum, where it had just been posted in one of those "Oh those whacky Japanese" threads.

[ふねん1]

I think I first discovered the existence of Touhou last year. It's kind of a long story regarding each step in the process, but I'll cut it short. I was following the WRYYYYYY thing over Youtube, when I found the "Touhou Parody #6" video - you know, where Sakuya and Meiling were the PC and Mac, and Sakuya performed the "Road Roller combo" to prove PC's superiority (which is the undeniable truth :V). I would go through a different process to get myself into the bullet hell games, but that parody video started it all.

[Furienify]

A friend introduced me to PCB, I screwed around as Sakuya (least ugly of all 3 girls... man that artwork was terrible) but failed totally miserably. Had NO idea what was going on or how to play the game. I thought Borders of Life were me actually making spellcards of my own. I figured that bombing as soon as the enemy started their card (which I had no idea how that worked- where's the health bar?! Uwaa~) was the coolest shit ever.

Also, the music was turned off. It got boring really fast. I stopped playing.

Listened to Touhou music for about a month after that without really knowing what was up. Picked SWR and played with a friend. Things snowballed from there, back to the shooter games and onwards.

Good times.

[YakumoHaku]

My friend showed me the Bad Apple video, and I was like, "this is hot, where is this from?"  He told me the characters are from Touhou, so I was like, "let's youtube this game."  I saw how ridiculous it was, and wanted to try it.  I got a demo, and was hooked. 

 
Me, too. I think I was watching filler Bleach and saw half of Bad Apple in the intro. Then I was like !!!
Well, I went onto Gaku Gaku and started reading doujins. I didn't start playing the game until recently.
IT LOOKED TOO HARD.

[Bitz]

I found out about Touhou when I saw someone playing it during Tech club. He was playing Imperishable Night extra, and I kept thinking, "wow, why are there so many of that girl?" each time there was a spell card and a cut-in of Mokou. That day I Googled and eventually got Imperishable Night, completely clueless to the fact that it was part of an entire series called Touhou. At that time, though, I admittedly felt kind of stupid playing it, since all the characters were female. :ohdear:

I didn't get into Touhou until I met someone else by complete chance who was into the music of Touhou, and was going around showing everyone Necrofantasia and U.N. Owen was Her. Things picked up from there, and here I am now.

[Coyote]

I posted for a while on Audiosurf's official forums when the game was first released (early 2008) and saw one of those nonsensical "look at the size of this torrent I'm downloading! LOL IT'S HUGE!!" threads. This particular torrent happened to be Touhou music. I'd heard of Touhou from any number of random places by that point, but this time I decided to finally see for myself what all the fuss was about. Discovered the games, bought PCB and IN, and that was that...

...no really, that was that, since shortly afterward, I got a new job, moved, and pretty much stopped caring about the games for a very long time. My base awareness level of the series remained high, though, mostly due to the music and all the zillions of arranges that were on Youtube. Earlier this year I decided I should try giving the games another shot, and I think this time ZUN really has won me over. <3 (This forum helps, too. I've lurked for ages on... uh, okay, that other site that I apparently can't type out... but never felt like I wanted to post there.)

[Esifex]

Wonderful little Irish Canadian girl would always have silly stories about the fanon/canon stories made up for the Touhou characters, and she'd share them with me. At first I was like 'okay, whatever, *nodnodplzshutup.*'

Once I caught on that most of the fanon became ascended fanon, I was like 'hey now. This has that big a following, and the creators are that okay with their fandom to let them come up with the backstory? That's p. cool.' I started trying to keep track of the crazy-ass names (I'm looking at you, Keine Kamishirasawa and Aya Shameimaru) and the main characters, and the villians, who weren't really villians, because they actually became main characters later on, and OH MY GOD WHY IS IT SO CONFUSING BUT SO AWESOME I MUST DIVE DEEPER INTO THIS.

And so I did. The first thing that sucked me in was the canon/fanon relation and the open-endedness of Gensokyo, with all the diverse backstories taken from mythology (Hiya Kaguya, Mokou) and plain silliness (Humanoid tengu? Sure, why not. Have some Kappa, too), and then I moved on to listening to the music. Not too ashamed to say I've got a couple of remixes of U.N.Owen Was Her saved to my computer, but I've also got buckets of epic orchestral remixes of some of the 'deeper' songs (in the sense that you have to dig through more of Touhou to find them, e.g. Fate of Sixty Years).

In my eyes, I became a Touhou fan shortly before the release of MoF, but I've never actually played any of the shooters beyond IN and PCB - both of which I have yet to successfully clear on normal difficulty. I'm more than competent on SWR/UNL, however, which I enjoy playing on a regular basis whenever I take my laptop anywhere without internet. I'd like to get some local friends to start playing it so I can duel 'em, or at the very least figure out how to patch up and connect online with anyone else. It's a low priority, though.

(Random tidbit - on World of Warcraft, I have a Holy spec Paladin. Her name is Yamaxanadu. When she dies, she doesn't make a corpse run, she makes a Corpse Voyage. BA-DUM, TISH)

[jigglyppuff8]

U.N Owen
Marisa stole the precious thing
Google touhou
Download demo
And the rest was history awful... for the rest of the fandom.

<Tengukami> I guess this warning needs to be on every single page of this thread: pirating the games is frowned upon here, as you can tell by the warning sticky on this board, so bringing up that you have pirated the games should be avoided. Thanks.

[game2011]

McRolled...   :blush:

But I didn't become interested in the series until I saw a fan art of 9 Touhou characters facing off against the 9 Straw Hat Pirates of One Piece.

This one:

[Merp]

Some lovely friend tricked me into playing Perfect Cherry Blossom saying it was the stepmania song pack he was suppose to zip for me~ Best day of my life(frustrating actually cause i thought i was too good for normal and hard).

[OkashiiKisei]

A friend introduced me to PCB, I screwed around as Sakuya (least ugly of all 3 girls... man that artwork was terrible) but failed totally miserably. Had NO idea what was going on or how to play the game. I thought Borders of Life were me actually making spellcards of my own. I figured that bombing as soon as the enemy started their card (which I had no idea how that worked- where's the health bar?! Uwaa~) was the coolest shit ever.

Also, the music was turned off. It got boring really fast. I stopped playing.

Listened to Touhou music for about a month after that without really knowing what was up. Picked SWR and played with a friend. Things snowballed from there, back to the shooter games and onwards.

Good times.

Why am I the only one who thinks the PCB art looks the best of all games? Reimu looked adorabubble~

[Furienify]

Why am I the only one who thinks the PCB art looks the best of all games? Reimu looked adorabubble~

Eh, it's mostly Marisa.

She looked a bit...wide. >_>