An uncle ran a game back when I was a kid. Remember the old box sets?
He moved away, but left his stuff behind. Guess who was the only one interested in the cool ass pictures out of all the kids :)
So I inherited his stuff by decree that if he can't even bother to answer a phone call, he must not care. And, he didn't, he moved back into the area years later and was slightly stoked that not only did the stuff still exist, but that someone was running games with it.
But, at first, it mostly sat on the bookshelf in my room because elementary school kids are hard to get to sit down and play lol. So I'd kinda play by myself.
Well, that changed as my friend group aged up enough to sit down and roll dice here and there.
By high school, I had found a group as a player, and we ran 2ed because that's what was there at the time. But that group fell apart, and I loved the game too much to just quit, but there weren't any groups because small town life is like that.
So, I badgered my friends into playing. My best friend had an older brother that ran games in college, and had done a few for my friend during summers. So with the two of us, we had enough "mass" to pull in the rest of what would become my steady play group for decades.
Yeah, since 92, I was forever DM lol.