My brother got me the Mentzer Red Box set for Christmas around 83 or 84. We also got the AD&D 1E Player's Handbook and Monster Manual. I think he DM'd the sample dungeon for me and my sister once and that was it. I have spent the majority of my life from then til about 2015 reading RPG books and never getting to play. I loved that 1E MM so much. Lost it when my mom found my stash of D&D books and Dragon Magazines and threw them out when I was in High School.
I played... once in High School with some kids from school but it was fairly underwhelming. I then played 2 or 3 times when 3E came out, my friend and I found a group in our area and went to play, it was an interesting experience. The guy hosting in his apartment was hell-bent on playing a monk and over the course of the 2 sessions we played, I think his monk died about 3 or 4 times... Also the DM was a tad on the weird side.
When 5E came out I introduced RPGs to my wife and 2 daughters and DMed them through Mines of Phandelver and part of Red Hand of Doom. That was a lot of fun and I was so proud of my daughters who were I think about 10 and 9 at the time.
I eventually got a long-term RPG group going around 2015 that only fizzled out due to Covid, but they were mostly interested in playing Star Wars/Edge of the Empire. We did do some D&D between SW campaigns but I had to DM it. So, since first getting that Red Box in 1984 I have been a player of D&D/fantasy RPGs a total of about 5 sessions. I don't mind DMing and I'm a designer/fiddler by nature anyway, but gosh darn it I really want to be a player in a campaign eventually! Fortunately my 9 year old son shows every sign of becoming an extraordinary DM as he levels grows up - he already regularly makes up games and "campaigns" and such though they mostly seem to be made of incomplete rules made up on the spot :)
I've been fiddling with home-brew rules and tweaks to things like S&W White Box, Knave, etc for awhile, but I'm really taken by Heroes of Adventure. So far its scratching all the itches I have for a system. I had just started a new campaign for the family using my homebrewed S&W rules in early Dec, and immediately switched us over to HoA though we've only had about 1 or 2 sessions since then so it's early to claim total victory, but I like it. It reminds me of a mix of the best from old D&D, Dungeons & Delvers Dice Pool Edition, and some of the more modern OSR stuff like Knave and Forbidden Realms