Okay, here's my story:
Back in the days when internet was quite slow (and not everyone had even internet!), I played FPS games mostly at private LAN parties (or alternatively SP vs. bots).
The first FPS I ever played was good ol' HL, and there's a funny story to it: We once had some summer fair at school once, where every class made up something to sell. Well, one of the classes above me decided to "sell" 10min of HL, 1on1 on 2 PCs over LAN, and it was awesome (lost quite an amount of money there ^^). Then my friends and me got more into computer gaming in general, and FPS was always something we liked. We played UT like freaks for some years, also some Serious Sam, but UT was our most loved one. Interestingly, we never ever played much Quake... I think we all fell for the pretty graphics in UT
.
Later we switched to UT2003 when it came out, and it replaced UT soon (although UT'03 always felt a bit "unfinished"). We also had much fun with Battlefield '42 then (especially with all the vehicles and such ... 1v1 on Wake, the good old times), and with Counterstrike 1.6, Jedi Knight III and some other nice MP shooters. Then we switched to UT2k4 when it came out, and basically stuck with it until we all finished school and our "LAN party club" broke down, since most of us still didn't have fast internet back then. I had also other things to attend, and therefore didn't play computer games very much after that, apart from some really nice ones in between, like Prey or Stalker SoC...
Well, until I really felt the need for some good ol' fragging and looked up Nexuiz (which I had heard of somewhere a few years back), found out that there's now Xonotic, and found it to be the perfect game for me - just some quick matches in between, no long developments etc. - and an awesome community on top! :-D