How did you discover video game music existed outside of video games?

Starting from 1990 (elementary school) and throughout, a video game theme had never left my mind. It left me in a good mood all day for all of grade school. In fact, I have had a video game song in my mind every day of my life so far. It's like a winamp playlist on random. And right now, for no reason whatsoever, "Final Fantasy 8 - 114 Breezy.mp3" is playing in my mind... and I hadn't thought about FF8 all month.

In late high school, year 2000, I started to realize I liked VGM. Very strange that I never knew I liked it even though I had a song in my mind for A DECADE. I started to crave it and had purposely left songs on the video game and just sat there to listen. VGM started to become substantive to my world. Then I found vgmusic.com and downloaded all the MIDI's from all the games I'm familiar with and made that my primary playlist for a year.

But in 2001 I slowly found mp3 soundtracks and started building a collection. Within a short time I found gamingforce and downloaded more. With gamingforce moving to a forum, I heard about vgmcentral -- a hub on the DC++ program that contained people with VGM and is still kicking in 2007. Because of that I tripled my collection.

In the present day, my highest value is gamingforce.com because of the ability to request rips, make rips, share, and talk about the subject. I would be depressed if GFF was down forever because my collection of rips as games come out would halt.

Jam it back in, in the dark.