I’ll start, with less of a discovery and more of a full history:
I think I was around 8 years old when I first got into them, so I can’t recall for certain, but it had to be a mobile game, because all I had was an iPad at the time. I remember some of my favorites from that time tended to be arbitrary mobile games like PickCrafter, Tap Tap Trillionaire (I/A), and the classic AdVenture Capitalist. It’s weird to see some games I used to play so long ago still maintained to this day.
For a fair while I fixated on a game called Cookie Collector 2 (now known as Cookies Inc) (I/A), with occasional brief interest in games made on Scratch. At some point, I learned about Antimatter Dimensions, and I was irreversibly hooked on browser incrementals. I think at the time I even went as far as disowning Cookies Inc, which was a bit extreme, but I was likely 10 or 11–I guess I wasn’t able to comprehend the concept of playing multiple games at the same time. :P
I stuck close to Antimatter Dimensions for a long time, and played most of the mods that had been created, but I can only recall getting deep into the community of Dilmod (potentially broken now?). I don’t think Dilmod itself served as inspiration for it, but while I was active in the community I created the first iteration of Tree Game, which was heavily inspired by AD’s Time Studies.
After Tree Game, I (most notably) went on to make Tree Game Rewritten, AltTPT (the first mod of The Prestige Tree, before TMT even existed), Tree Game Reloaded, CLEANSED, idle2.html, Pipegame, and most recently, galaxy.click. It seems like a lot when laid out like this, but the games tend to be very short, and I’ve only published roughly 8 spread out over 4 years. It’s okay to not be a constant idea machine, or a master of productivity. It’s still possible to make some pretty neat stuff even if you don’t have a lot of time or energy.
My first incremental “game” would have been Progress Quest, probably. I really liked the idea of numbers going up, and there were a few early clickers about in 2009, 2010 - and then I found Anti Idle - which I still play today. Have played everything on the Ultimate List of Incremental Games, and since then the market’s been flooded with low-effort reskins and I lost interest in keeping up and shoot for more satisfying games rather than a broad spectrum.
My favourite game for years was Civ IV, which I see now I played in a sort of incremental-ish fashion - for those who know it, I played using cultural victory only, no space, city flipping through culture, no wars. My victory objective was to win through supreme culture and incrementally take all my opponents’ cities that way. It was always interesting trying to place the big culture-generators at the periphery of my empire for best effect. This would have been late-90s? I’ve still never won the game this way, but lots of incrementals have no end :D