I remember I saw articles about Shadow of Chernobyl in a gaming magazine in 2004-2005 and judging the renders and screens they chose to show in the article, I hated it.
Fast forward to 2007 I actually tried it myself to check what the fuss was all about and again I hated it since at that time I wasn’t taking video games too serious and didn’t bother to even finish them. I just activated cheats / trainers and caused mayhem. I also didn’t have a powerful PC enough to run the game decently even on Static Lighting (DX8) so that didn’t help.
Even around the time that Clear Sky was in development, I was bashing the game for whatever stupid reason but around 2009 when Call of Pripyat was released, I decided to give SoC another try and for whatever reason it clicked. Just like that. And the rest is history 